R. William Gosper, Jr., known as Bill Gosper, is a mathematician and programmer. Along with Richard Greenblatt, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and holds a place of pride in the Lisp community. He is also noted for his work on continued fraction representations of real numbers, and for suggesting the algorithm (which bears his name) for finding closed form hypergeometric identities. Richard D. Greenblatt is a programmer. ... Hacker is a term used to describe people who use computers. ... Lisp is a reflective, multi-paradigm programming language with a long history. ... In mathematics, a continued fraction is an expression such as where a0 is some integer and all the other numbers an are positive integers. ... In mathematics, a hypergeometric series is the sum of a sequence of terms in which the ratios of successive coefficients k is a rational function of k. ...

Gosper received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from MIT in 1965. Affiliated with the MIT AI Lab during his prime, he performed many programming feats in computational mathematics, the MIT MacLisp system, and HAKMEM. He made major contributions to the Macsyma computer algebra system at MIT, later working with Symbolics and Macsyma, Inc. on the greatly improved commercial versions. A bachelors degree is usually an undergraduate academic degree awarded for a course or major that generally lasts three or four years. ... The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a research and educational institution located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT is a world leader in science and technology, as well as in many other fields, including management, economics, linguistics, political science, and philosophy. ... 1965 (MCMLXV) was a common year starting on Friday (link goes to calendar). ... ... MacLisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language. ... HAKMEM, alternatively known as AI Memo 239, is a 1972 memo (technical report) of the MIT AI Lab that describes a wide variety of hacks, primarily useful and clever algorithms for mathematical computation. ... Macsyma is a computer algebra system that was originally developed from 1967 to 1982 at the MIT AI Lab as part of Project MAC. In 1982, MIT submitted a copy of Macsyma to the United States Department of Energy, which was one of the major funders of Macsyma development. ...

He became intensely interested in the Game of Life shortly after John Horton Conway had proposed it. Conway conjectured on the existence of infinitely growing patterns, and offered a reward for an example. Gosper was the first to find such a pattern, and won the prize. Gosper was also the originator of the hashlife algorithm that can speed up the computation of Life patterns by many orders of magnitude. Gosper Glider Gun creating gliders. The Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. ... John Horton Conway (born December 26, 1937, Liverpool, England) is a prolific mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. ... Hashlife is an algorithm for computing the long-term fate of a given starting configuration in Conways Game of Life. ...

In the 1970s Gosper moved to California for a three year stint at Stanford, where he lectured and helped Donald Knuth write volume II of The Art of Computer Programming. 1970 (MCMLXX) was a common year starting on Thursday. ... Donald Knuth at a reception for the Open Content Alliance. ... Cover of books The Art of Computer Programming is a comprehensive monograph written by Donald Knuth which covers many kinds of programming algorithms and their analysis. ...

Since that time, he has worked at or consulted for Xerox PARC, Symbolics, Wolfram Research, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and Macsyma Inc.. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was a flagship research division of the Xerox Corporation, based in Palo Alto, California, USA, which essentially created the modern personal computer paper paradigm. ... Wolfram Research is part of the Wolfram Group which consists of four companies: Wolfram Research Inc. ... Aerial view of the lab and surrounding area. ... Macsyma is a computer algebra system that was originally developed from 1968 to 1982 at the MIT AI Lab as part of Project MAC. It was the first comprehensive symbolic mathematics system. ...

External links

• Bill Gosper's webpage