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Bill Gosper




Gosper enrolled in system. He also made major contributions to the Macsyma computer algebra system at MIT, later working with Symbolics and Macsyma, Inc. on the greatly improved commercial versions.

He became intensely interested in the Game Of Life shortly after John Horton Conway had proposed it. Conway conjectured on the existence of infinitely growing patterns, and offered a reward for an example. Gosper was the first to find such a pattern (specifically, the Glider Gun ), and won the prize. Gosper was also the originator of the Hashlife algorithm that can speed up the computation of Life patterns by many orders of magnitude.

In the 1970 s Gosper moved to California for a three year stint at Stanford, where he lectured and helped Donald Knuth write volume II of The Art Of Computer Programming .

Since that time, he has worked at or consulted for Xerox PARC , Symbolics , Wolfram Research , the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory , and Macsyma Inc. .


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  NAME Gosper, William
  ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gosper, Bill
  SHORT DESCRIPTION American mathematician, programmer/hacker
  PLACE OF BIRTH Pennsauken, New Jersey