12 Facts About Harold Abelson

Harold Abelson directed the first implementation of the language Logo for the Apple II, which made the language widely available on personal computers starting in 1981; and published a widely selling book on Logo in 1982.

Harold Abelson led an internal investigation of the school's choices and role in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which concluded that MIT did nothing wrong legally, but recommended that MIT consider changing some of its internal policies.

Harold Abelson graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics from Princeton University in 1969 after completing a senior thesis, on Actions with fixed-point set: a homology sphere, supervised by William Browder.

Harold Abelson received his PhD in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973 after completing his research on Topologically distinct conjugate varieties with finite fundamental group supervised by Dennis Sullivan.

Harold Abelson is a founding director of Creative Commons and Public Knowledge, and a director of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

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Harold Abelson has a longstanding interest in using computation as a conceptual framework in teaching.

Harold Abelson directed the first implementation of Logo for the Apple II, which made the language widely available on personal computers starting in 1981; and published a widely selling book on Logo in 1982.

Together with Gerald Jay Sussman, Harold Abelson developed MIT's introductory computer science subject, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, a subject organized around the notion that a computer language is primarily a formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology, rather than just a way to get a computer to perform operations.

Harold Abelson is a visiting faculty member at Google, where he was part of the App Inventor for Android team, an educational program aiming to make it easy for people with no programming background to write mobile phone applications and "explore whether this could change the nature of introductory computing".

Harold Abelson is coauthor of the book App Inventor with David Wolber, Ellen Spertus, and Liz Looney, published by O'Reilly Media in 2011.

Harold Abelson is known to have been involved in publishing Andrew Huang's Hacking the Xbox and Keith Winstein's seven-line Perl DeCSS script, and Library Access to Music Project, MIT's campus-wide music distribution system.

Harold Abelson had been arrested near MIT and was facing up to 35 years imprisonment for the alleged crime of downloading Journal Storage articles through MIT's open access campus network.