Bill Gosper

Ralph William Gosper, Jr. (born 1943), known as Bill Gosper, is an American mathematician and programmer from Pennsauken Township, New Jersey. Along with Richard Greenblatt, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and holds a place of pride in the Lisp community. Gosper enrolled in MIT in 1961, and received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from MIT in 1965. After taking a course on programming in his second year with John McCarthy, Gosper became affiliated with the MIT AI Lab. He ultimately wound up in Palo Alto at Stanford's AI Lab with Donald Knuth working on Knuth's epic work as well as working for XEROX PARC, Macsyma and others. His contributions to computational mathematics include HAKMEM and the MIT Maclisp...