Home > Gerald Jay Sussman

Sussman is a coauthor (with Hal Abelson and Julie Sussman ) of the introductory computer science textbook used at MIT The textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, has been translated into French, German, Polish, Chinese, and Japanese. As a result of this and other contributions to computer-scienceIn its most general sense, computer science CS or compsci is the study of computation and information processing, both in hardware and in software. Introduction Computer science encomposses a variety of topics relating to computation, ranging from abstrac education, Sussman received the ACMThe Association for Computing Machinery or ACM was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is currently around 78,000. Its headquarters are in New York, New York. Activities is organized into over's Karl Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award in 1990Events January January 3 Former leader of Panama Manuel Noriega surrenders to American forces. January 7 The Leaning Tower of Pisa is closed to the public due to safety concerns. January 9 Lt Gen Bazilio Olara Okello The man who led the coup aginst Dr Apo, and the Amar G. Bose award for teaching in 19911991 like 2002, is a palindromic year. It also has the same calendar as 2002, including Easter on March 31. It is a common year starting on Tuesday. Events January January 2 Sharon Pratt Dixon is sworn in as mayor of Washington, DC becoming the first blac.

Sussman's contributions to Artificial Intelligence include problem solving by debugging almost-right plans, propagation of constraints applied to electrical circuit analysis and synthesis, dependency-based explanation and dependency-based backtracking, and various language structures for expressing problem-solving strategies. Sussman and his former student, Guy L. Steele Jr., invented the Scheme programming languageThe Scheme programming language is a functional programming language and a dialect of Lisp. It was developed by Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman in the 1970s and introduced to the academic world via a series of papers now referred to as Sussman and St in 1975Events January January 1 Watergate scandal: John N. Mitchell, H. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman are found guilty of the Watergate cover-up and are sentenced to 30 months to 8 years in jail on February 21 January 5 The Tasman Bridge in Tasmania, Australia, i.

Sussman saw that Artificial Intelligence ideas can be applied to computer-aided designThis article is about computer-aided design. For other meanings, see CAD (disambiguation). Computer-aided design CAD is the use of a wide range of computer-based tools that assist engineers in their design activities. It involves both software and special. Sussman developed, with his graduate students, sophisticated computer-aided design tools for VLSI. Steele made the first Scheme chips in 1978. These ideas and the AI-based CAD technology to support them were further developed in the Scheme chips of 1979 and 1981. The technique and experience developed was then used to design other special-purpose computers. Sussman was the principal designer of the Digital Orrery, a machine designed to do high-precision integrations for orbital mechanics experiments. The Orrery was designed and built by a few people in a few months, using AI-based simulation and compilation tools.

Using the Digital Orrery, Sussman has worked with Jack Wisdom to discover numerical evidence for chaotic motions in the outer planets. The Digital Orrery is now retired at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. Sussman was also the lead designer of the Supercomputer Toolkit, another multiprocessor computer optimized for evolving systems of ordinary differential equations. The Supercomputer Toolkit was used by Sussman and Wisdom to confirm and extend the discoveries made with the Digital Orrery to include the entire planetary system.

Sussman has pioneered the use of computational descriptions to communicate methodological ideas in teaching subjects in Electrical Circuits and in Signals and Systems. Over the past decade Sussman and Wisdom have developed a subject that uses computational techniques to communicate a deeper understanding of advanced Classical mechanics. Computational algorithms are used to express the methods used in the analysis of dynamical phenomena. Expressing the methods in a computer language forces them to be unambiguous and computationally effective. Students are expected to read the programs and to extend them and to write new ones. The task of formulating a method as a computer-executable program and debugging that program is a powerful exercise in the learning process. Also, once formalized procedurally, a mathematical idea becomes a tool that can be used directly to compute results. Sussman and Wisdom, with Meinhard Mayer, have produced a new textbook, "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics," to capture these new ideas.

Sussman is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is also on the board of directors of Free Software Foundation (FSF), a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a bonded locksmith, a life member of the American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute (AWI), a member of the Massachusetts Watchmakers-Clockmakers Association, a member of the Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston (ATMOB), and a member of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL).