Gerald Jay Sussman

Gerald Jay Sussman ( born August 9, 1947) is an American computer scientist.

Sussman studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT ) Mathematics, with a bachelor's degree in 1968, was there but since the mid- 1960s in research on artificial intelligence active. In 1973 he received his doctorate in Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert (A Computational Model of Skill Acquisition). He is there today Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering.

In 1975 he developed with his student Guy L. Steele the Lisp dialect Scheme, which he also made early on the public free ( under GNU license ). Even otherwise, he was active in the establishment phase of the Free Software Foundation in the 1980s ( with Richard Stallman ).

Sussman developed with his students and Applications of Artificial Intelligence in CAD ​​for the design of VLSI chips. With Steele he developed in the late 1970s Special Scheme chips specifically for execution of commands the Scheme language, and he also designed and built in 1988 chip for high precision calculations in celestial mechanics (Digital Orrery ). With Jack Wisdom, he examined thus evidence of chaotic dynamics in the solar system, especially in the orbit of Pluto. Also with Wisdom he built the " Super Computer Toolkit " for calculations of the solutions of ordinary differential equations, the successor to the Digital Orrery. Thus, they confirmed in 1992 evidence of chaotic behavior in long-term simulations of the solar system, the Jacques Laskar already took place in 1989.

Sussman is also known for the textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Harold Abelson along with. He also wrote a book Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics with Jack Wisdom and Meinhard Mayer Classical Mechanics ( with special emphasis on numerical algorithms ), which as its software textbook Scheme code used as well. For his textbook, he received the 1990 Karl Karlstrom Outstanding Education Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM ).

Sussman is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM.

Writings

  • Harold Abelson (with the participation of Julie Sussman ): Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, MIT Press, McGraw Hill, 1985, 1996
  • Jack Wisdom with Meinhard E. Mayer: Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, MIT Press 2001
  • A computer model for skill acquisition, American Elsevier 1975
Guy L. Steele, Jr. Scheme (programming language) Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Integrated Authority File
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