Persons

Biography

Frederick P. Brooks Jr. was born in 1931 of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, parents. He received the A.B in Physics from Duke University in 1953, and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1956, under Howard Aiken.

San Murugesan, BRITE Professional Services, Australia

Paul Hyman
Winner of the 1971 A.M. Turing Award, John McCarthy was a founder of artificial intelligence and inventor of the Lisp programming language.
The FIELD OF artificial intelligence (AI) was founded at a conference at Dartmouth College in 1956, with John McCarthy as one of its influential attendees. McCarthy subsequently expanded on the notion of logical AI, writing what appears to be the first paper on the topic, “Programs With Common Sense,” in 1958.

Philip L. Frana
The Ch arl es Babb age Instit ute holds one of the world’s largest collections of research- grade oral history interviews relating to the history of computers, software, and networking. Most of the 400 interviews have been conducted in the context of specific research projects, which facilitate the interviewer’s extensive preparation and often suggest specific lines of questions. Transcripts from these oral histories are a key source in understanding the history of computing, since traditional historical sources are frequently incomplete.

Paul Hyman
Colleagues recall the creator of C and codeveloper Unix, an unassuming but brilliant man who enjoyed playing practical jokes on his coworkers.
Of the three giants in the computer industry who passed away last October, Steve Jobs was easily the most recognizable one. And that is exactly how Dennis Ritchie preferred it.
Even though much of today’s digital world is built from tools he created, Ritchie, who authored the C programming language and cocreated Unix with Ken Thompson, never sought the spotlight.

Len Shustek, Editor
In this second of a two-part interview by Edward Feigenbaum, we find Knuth, having completed three volumes of The Art of Computer Programming, drawn to creating a system to produce books digitally.
Don switches gears and for a while and becomes what Ed Feigenbaum calls “The World’s Greatest Programmer.”

Avi Wigderson

Peter J. Denning, Neville Holmes

This e-mail interview with Peter Denning sprang from comments in the October 2010 The Profession column, “The Future of the Computing Profession: Readers’ E-mails” about Denning’s essay, “The Great Principles of Computing” (American Scientist, Sept./Oct. 2010, pp. 369-372).

Computing has its own paradigm, distinct from engineering or science.

His biographer says Turing invented computer science, artificial intelligence, and mathematical biology.