Henry Givens Baker Jr. is an American computer scientist who has made contributions in

garbage collection Waste collection is a part of the process of waste management. It is the transfer of solid waste from the point of use and disposal to the point of treatment or landfill. Waste collection also includes the curbside collection of recyclabl ...

functional programming language In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that ...

s, and

linear logic Linear logic is a substructural logic proposed by Jean-Yves Girard as a refinement of classical and intuitionistic logic, joining the dualities of the former with many of the constructive properties of the latter. Although the logic has also ...

. He was one of the founders of

Symbolics Symbolics was a computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc., and a privately held company that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.

, a company that designed and manufactured a line of

Lisp machine Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture, and in a sense, they ...

s. In 2006 he was recognized as a Distinguished Scientist by the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

. He is notable for his research in garbage collection, particularly Baker's real-time copying collector, and on the

Actor model The actor model in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats ''actor'' as the universal primitive of concurrent computation. In response to a message it receives, an actor can: make local decisions, create mor ...

. Baker received his B.Sc. (1969), S.M. (1973), E.E. (1973), and Ph.D. (1978) degrees at M.I.T. The

Chicken Scheme compiler Chicken (stylized as CHICKEN) is a programming language, specifically a compiler and interpreter which implement a dialect of the programming language Scheme, and which compiles Scheme source code to standard C. It is mostly R5RS compliant an ...

was inspired by an innovative design of Baker's.

Bibliography

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References

External links

Henry Baker's Archive of Research Papers
at the Internet Archive Programming language researchers Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni American computer scientists {{compu-scientist-stub