After receiving his Ph.D., he taught programming and computer architecture for six years as member of the faculty at
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as an assistant professor of
computer science and
mathematics. He published
Writing efficient programs in 1982. Bentley moved to the Computer Science Research Center at
Bell Laboratories, where he was Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff. In this period he developed various languages, continued his algorithm research and developed various software and products for communication systems. He co-authored an optimized
Quicksort algorithm with
Doug McIlroy. He left Bell Labs in 2001 and worked at Avaya Labs Research until 2013. In this period he developed enterprise communication systems. He found an optimal solution for the two-dimensional case of
Klee's measure problem: given a set of
n rectangles, find the
area of their union. He and Thomas Ottmann invented the
Bentley–Ottmann algorithm, an efficient
algorithm for finding all intersecting pairs among a collection of line segments. He wrote the
Programming Pearls column for the
Communications of the ACM magazine, and later collected the articles into two books of the same name in 1986 and 1988. Bentley received the ''
Dr. Dobb's'' Excellence in Programming award in 2004. ==Personal life==