Bill Gosper

Ralph William Gosper Jr. (born April 26, 1943) is an American mathematician and programmer. Along with Richard Greenblatt, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and he holds a place of pride in the Lisp community. The Gosper curve and Gosper's algorithm are named after him.

Becoming a hacker In high school, Gosper was interested in model rockets until one of his friends was injured in a rocketry accident and contracted a fatal brain infection. 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. Gosper was also the originator of the Hashlife algorithm that can speed up the computation of Life patterns by many orders of magnitude.

Packing problems Gosper has created numerous packing problem puzzles, such as "Twubblesome Twelve".

Symbolic computation 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. In particular, this research resulted in his work on continued fraction representations of real numbers and Gosper's algorithm for finding closed form hypergeometric identities.

In 1985, Gosper briefly held the world record for computing the most digits of pi with 17 million digits. See chronology of computation of π.

Space-filling curves In the continuity of early 20th century examples of space-filling curves—the Koch-Peano curve, Cesàro and Lévy C curve, all special cases of the general de Rham curve—and following the path of Benoit Mandelbrot, Gosper discovered the Peano-Gosper curve, before engaging with variations on the Harter-Heighway dragon. In the late 80s, Gosper independently discovered the Gosper-Lafitte triangle.