Bill Gosper

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Bill Gosper bigraphy, stories - American mathematician, programmer/hacker

Bill Gosper : biography

1943 –

Ralph William Gosper, Jr. (born 1943), known as Bill Gosper, is an American mathematician and programmer from Pennsauken Township, New Jersey., Vintage Computer Festival. Accessed January 3, 2007. Along with Richard Greenblatt, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and he holds a place of pride in the Lisp community.

Key contributions

Game of life

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.

Packing problems

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

Symbolic computation

Perhaps his most profound contribution is that he was the first person to realize the possibilities of symbolic computation on a computer as a mathematics research tool, whereas computer methods were previously limited to purely numerical methods. In particular, this research resulted in his work on continued fraction representations of real numbers, and far more famously, developing Gosper’s algorithm for finding closed form hypergeometric identities. Because his mathematics is largely self-taught and a number of his original formulas have inspired professional mathematicians to write papers developing them into full fledged theories, he has been considered a modern day Ramanujan.

Gosper briefly held the world record for computing the most digits of pi with 17 million digits. English translation by Catriona and David Lischka. Record was in 1985. See chronology of computation of π.

Consultancy

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

Working with Knuth

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.

Becoming a hacker

In high school, Gosper was interested in model rockets until one of his friends was injured in a rocketry accident and contracted a fatal brain infection.. Gosper enrolled in MIT in 1961, and he received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from MIT in 1965 despite becoming disaffected from the mathematics department because of their anti-computer attitude.

In his second year at MIT, Gosper took a programming course from John McCarthy and became affiliated with the MIT AI Lab. In 1974, he moved to Stanford University, where he worked with Donald Knuth. Eventually he also worked for Xerox PARC, Macsyma and others.

His contributions to computational mathematics include HAKMEM and the MIT Maclisp system. He made major contributions to the Macsyma, Project MAC’s computer algebra system. Gosper later worked with Symbolics and Macsyma, Inc. on commercial versions of Macsyma.