Ralph William Gosper Jr. | |
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| Born | (1943-04-26)April 26, 1943 (age 82) |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Occupation(s) | Programmer, Computer scientist, Mathematician |
| Organizations | Xerox PARC,Symbolics,Wolfram Research, theLawrence Livermore Laboratory,Macsyma, Inc. |
| Known for | Gosper curve,Gosper Glider Gun,Gosper's algorithm,Hashlife |
Ralph William Gosper Jr. (born April 26, 1943), known asBill Gosper, is an American mathematician and programmer.[1] Along withRichard Greenblatt, he may be considered to have founded thehacker community, and he holds a place of pride in theLisp community.[2] TheGosper curve andGosper's algorithm are named after him.
In high school, Gosper was interested inmodel rockets until one of his friends was injured in a rocketry accident and contracted a fatal brain infection.[3] Gosper enrolled inMIT in 1961, and he received hisbachelor's degree in mathematics from MIT in 1965 despite becoming disaffected with the mathematics department because of their anti-computer attitude.[3]
In his second year at MIT, Gosper took a programming course fromJohn McCarthy and became affiliated with theMIT AI Lab.
His contributions to computational mathematics includeHAKMEM and the MITMaclisp system. He made major contributions toMacsyma,Project MAC's computer algebra system. Gosper later worked withSymbolics andMacsyma, Inc. on commercial versions of Macsyma.
In 1974, he moved toStanford University, where he lectured, and worked withDonald Knuth.[3]
Since that time, he has worked at or consulted forXerox PARC,Symbolics,Wolfram Research, theLawrence Livermore Laboratory, andMacsyma Inc.
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He became intensely interested in theGame of Life shortly afterJohn Horton Conway had proposed it. Conway conjectured the existence of infinitely growing patterns, and offered a reward for an example. Gosper was the first to find such a pattern, theglider gun, and won the prize.[4] Gosper was also the originator of theHashlife algorithm that can speed up the computation of Life patterns by many orders of magnitude.
Gosper has created numerouspacking problem puzzles, such as "Twubblesome Twelve".[5]
Gosper was the first person to realize the possibilities ofsymbolic computation on a computer as a mathematics research tool,[citation needed] whereas computer methods were previously limited to purely numerical methods. In particular, this research resulted in his work oncontinued fraction representations[6] of real numbers andGosper's algorithm for finding closed formhypergeometric identities.
In 1985, Gosper briefly held the world record for computing the most digits ofpi with 17 million digits.[7] Seechronology of computation of π.
In the continuity of early 20th century examples ofspace-filling curves—the Koch-Peano curve, Cesàro andLévy C curve, all special cases of the generalde Rham curve—and following the path ofBenoit Mandelbrot, Gosper discovered thePeano-Gosper curve, before engaging with variations on theHarter-Heighway dragon.[8] In the late 80s, Gosper independently discovered the Gosper-Lafitte triangle.[9]
for the freeMathematica Player
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