杰拉德·杰伊·萨斯曼

杰拉德·杰伊·萨斯曼（英语：Gerald Jay Sussman，1947年2月8日—），生于美国，著名计算机科学家，现为麻省理工学院教授。他是自由软件基金会的创始元老之一，现任理事。

生平

1968年，在麻省理工取得数学理学士，1973年取得数学博士学位。

1975年，与盖伊·史提尔二世共同开发了Scheme编程语言。

著作

《计算机程序的构造和解释》

《经典力学的结构与解释》

Gerald Jay Sussman (born February 8, 1947) is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has been involved in artificial intelligence (AI) research at MIT since 1964. His research has centered on understanding the problem-solving strategies used by scientists and engineers, with the goals of automating parts of the process and formalizing it to provide more effective methods of science and engineering education. Sussman has also worked in computer languages, in computer architecture, and in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design.

Education

Sussman attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate and received his SB in mathematics in 1968. He continued his studies at MIT and obtained a PhD in 1973, also in mathematics, under the supervision of Seymour Papert. His doctoral thesis was titled "A Computational Model of Skill Acquisition" focusing on artificial intelligence and machine learning, using a computational performance model named HACKER.

According to a common story, in 1966, Marvin Minsky tasked his student Gerald Jay Sussman to “spend the summer linking a camera to a computer and getting the computer to describe what it saw.” This story was often told to illustrate that the difficulty of computer vision was not apparent to AI researchers in the early days.

Academic work

Sussman is a coauthor (with Hal Abelson and Julie Sussman) of the introductory computer science textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). It was used at MIT for several decades, and has been translated into several languages.

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 programming language Scheme in 1975.

Sussman saw that artificial intelligence ideas can be applied to computer-aided design (CAD). Sussman developed, with his graduate students, sophisticated computer-aided design tools for Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI). Steele made the first Scheme hardware 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 were 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 hardware was designed and built by a few people in a few months.

Using the Digital Orrery, Sussman has worked with Jack Wisdom to discover numerical evidence for chaotic motions in the outer planets. The Digital Orrery machine 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 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.