William Arthur Martin (1938-1981) was a computer scientist from

Oklahoma City Oklahoma City (), officially the City of Oklahoma City, and often shortened to OKC, is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The county seat of Oklahoma County, it ranks 20th among United States cities in population, a ...

, Oklahoma. After graduating from

Northwest Classen High School Northwest Classen High School is a public high school serving students in grades 9–12 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. History Northwest Classen High School was built in 1955 to accommodate the growing population in the northwest corridor of Okla ...

, where he was a state

wrestling Wrestling is a series of combat sports involving grappling-type techniques such as clinch fighting, throws and takedowns, joint locks, pins and other grappling holds. Wrestling techniques have been incorporated into martial arts, combat ...

champion, he attended

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

where he received a bachelor's degree (1960), master's (1962) and a Ph.D. (1967) in electrical engineering under supervision of

Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...

with a dissertation on "''Symbolic Mathematical Laboratory''". While obtaining those degrees, he worked as a

teaching assistant A teaching assistant or teacher's aide (TA) or education assistant (EA) or team teacher (TT) is an individual who assists a teacher with instructional responsibilities. TAs include ''graduate teaching assistants'' (GTAs), who are graduate stude ...

at MIT (beginning in 1960). He became an assistant professor in 1968 and was promoted to associate professor of electrical engineering in 1972. In 1975, he received

academic tenure Tenure is a category of academic appointment existing in some countries. A tenured post is an indefinite academic appointment that can be terminated only for cause or under extraordinary circumstances, such as financial exigency or program disco ...

. He held a joint appointment at the

MIT Sloan School of Management The MIT Sloan School of Management (MIT Sloan or Sloan) is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Sloan offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree programs, ...

. His research pulled him towards the

Project MAC Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...

, which became the Laboratory for Computer Science and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he researched expert systems. After finishing a Ph.D. dissertation on symbolic mathematics, Martin co-founded the

Macsyma Macsyma (; "Project MAC's SYmbolic MAnipulator") is one of the oldest general-purpose computer algebra systems still in wide use. It was originally developed from 1968 to 1982 at MIT's Project MAC. In 1982, Macsyma was licensed to Symbolics a ...

project in 1968 and directed it until 1971. Macsyma later became a successful commercial product and is also the core of the free Maxima system. Martin then worked in

automatic programming In computer science, the term automatic programming identifies a type of computer programming in which some mechanism generates a computer program to allow human programmers to write the code at a higher abstraction level. There has been little ...

, knowledge representation and natural language processing.

Bibliography

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External links

Obituary
from ''Tech Talk''

References

1981 deaths 1938 births People from Oklahoma City American computer scientists MIT Sloan School of Management faculty Lisp (programming language) people Natural language processing researchers Computational linguistics researchers {{compu-scientist-stub