John Howard Smith is an American mathematician and retired professor of mathematics at Boston College.[1] He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963, under the supervision of Kenkichi Iwasawa.[1] [2] In voting theory, he is known for the Smith set, the smallest nonempty set of candidates such that, in every pairwise matchup (two-candidate election/runoff) between a member and a non-member, the member is the winner by majority rule, and for the Smith criterion, a property of certain election systems in which the winner is guaranteed to belong to the Smith set.[3] He has also made contributions to spectral graph theory[4] and additive number theory.[5]