Gerald Jay Sussman

thumb|Jerry_Sussman 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. Quotes I am most proud of the fact that my work has contributed to the education (not training) of many students, at all levels. Through my classes, I have influenced the thinking styles of thousands of undergraduates. I have been the PhD thesis supervisor of almost 50 wonderful graduate students. Many of them have become fine teachers. And ideas from my books have influenced some high-school curricula. I do not think that the impact of Scheme has sunk into the culture of computing even now. People make elaborate languages that provide shortcuts and “conveniences” that tend to hide the ideas in their programs, rather than expose them. The essential idea is best captured by the introductory paragraph of the foreword to the IEEE Standard for the Scheme Programming Language: Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary. Scheme programming language demonstrates that a very small number of rules for forming expressions, with few restrictions on how they are composed, suffice to form a practical and efficient programming language that is flexible enough to support most of the major programming paradigms in use today. Gerald Jay Sussman interview after being awarded the Taylor L. Booth Education Award Recipient External links Category:Electrical engineers Category:Academics from the United States Category:1947 births Category:Living people