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 he holds a place of pride in the Lisp community.

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.

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