1. In high school, Bill Gosper was interested in model rockets until one of his friends was injured in a rocketry accident and contracted a fatal brain infection.
10 Facts About Bill Gosper
1. 2.
Bill Gosper enrolled in MIT in 1961, and he received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from MIT in 1965 despite becoming disaffected with the mathematics department because of their anti-computer attitude.
3.
Bill Gosper made major contributions to Macsyma, Project MAC's computer algebra system.
4.
Bill Gosper later worked with Symbolics and Macsyma, Inc on commercial versions of Macsyma.
5.
Bill Gosper became intensely interested in the Game of Life shortly after John Horton Conway had proposed it.
6.
Bill Gosper was the first to find such a pattern, the glider gun, and won the prize.
7.
Bill Gosper was the originator of the Hashlife algorithm that can speed up the computation of Life patterns by many orders of magnitude.
8.
Bill Gosper has created numerous packing problem puzzles, such as "Twubblesome Twelve".
9.
Bill Gosper was the first person to realize the possibilities of symbolic computation on a computer as a mathematics research tool, whereas computer methods were previously limited to purely numerical methods.
10.
In 1985, Bill Gosper briefly held the world record for computing the most digits of pi with 17 million digits.