Bill Gosper

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ralph William Gosper, Jr
Born	1943
Nationality	American
Alma mater	MIT
Occupation	Programmer

Ralph William Gosper, Jr., (b. 1943) known as Bill Gosper, is an American mathematician and programmer from Pennsauken Township, New Jersey.^[1] 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 fractional representations of real numbers, and for suggesting the algorithm (which bears his name) for finding closed form hypergeometric identities.

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. His contributions to computational mathematics include HAKMEM [1] and the MIT Maclisp system. He also made major contributions to the Macsyma computer algebra system at MIT, later working with Symbolics and Macsyma, Inc. on the greatly improved commercial versions.

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 (specifically, the Glider gun), 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.

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.

Since that time, he has worked at or consulted for Xerox PARC, Symbolics, Wolfram Research, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and Macsyma Inc.

Gosper has created numerous packing problem puzzles, such as "Twubblesome Twelve".

[edit] See also

• Gosper curve

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Bill Gosper's webpage
• Bill Gosper's Graphics
• Twubblesome Twelve Puzzle - version for the free Mathematica Player

Persondata
NAME	Gosper, William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Gosper, Bill
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American mathematician, programmer/hacker
DATE OF BIRTH
PLACE OF BIRTH	Pennsauken Township, New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH