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Herbert Leo Gelernter (December 17, 1929 – May 28, 2015) was a professor in the Computer Science Department of Stony Brook University.

Short biography

Having taken his B.S. in 1951 from Brooklyn College, Gelernter received his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester in 1957.

Gelernter's extended visit to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1960/61, while he was developing a prototype of his 'vidicon' (a system which dispensed with film, and used a television-camera tube to record a spark-chamber event and store it as digitized data on magnetic tape) stimulated the development of a data-handling system for spark chambers in early 1961.

During his time at IBM, he wrote some of the first artificial intelligence software—his "geometry theorem machine" was the first advanced AI program, and the third AI program ever. It is a logical AI system that can prove theorems in planar geometry about parallel lines, congruence, and equality and inequality of segments and angles. Like Logic Theorist, it uses heuristics.

He implemented, with Nathaniel Rochester, a computer language for list processing within FORTRAN. The work for this was done with Carl Gerberich at IBM, to this end producing the Fortran list processing language (FLPL).

His most ambitious project during his tenure at Stony Brook University was the SYNCHEM expert problem-solving system for the discovery of potential routes to the total synthesis of organic molecules through a self-guided intelligent search and application of its large knowledge base of graph transforms, rules and sophisticated heuristics representing generalized organic reactions organized around recognized functional groups.

In 1952, Gelernter married Ruth, a daughter of rabbi Theodore Norton Lewis. His sons are the geneticist and Yale professor Joel Gelernter and the computer scientist and social commentator David Gelernter, also a Yale professor. His daughter Judith is a research scientist in the Information Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Gelernter died on May 28, 2015.

See also

• List of Jewish American computer scientists
• History of artificial intelligence
• Timeline of artificial intelligence

References

1. ^ American Men and Women of Science, 21st edition, vol. 3, Thomson/ Gale, 2009, p. 76
2. Milestones in Computer Science and Information Technology, Edwin D. Reilly, Greenwood Press, 2003, p. 318
3. "In Memoriam - Professor Emeritus". Stony Brook University. Retrieved November 8, 2024.
4. ^ "Stony Brook University". Retrieved November 26, 2011.
5. The two-nucleon interaction at high energies and the Lévy potential University of Rochester. Dept. of Physics., (1957)- 260 pages retrieved 18:03(GMT) October 26, 2011
6. Krige, John (April 1987). "The development of techniques for the analysis of track-chamber pictures at CERN" (PDF). CERN - Studies in CERN History. Retrieved July 12, 2019.
7. Gelernter, H. L.; Rochester, N. (October 1958). "Intelligent Behavior in Problem-Solving Machines". IBM Journal of Research and Development. 2 (4): 336–345. doi:10.1147/rd.24.0336. ISSN 0018-8646. S2CID 28472029.
8. Gelernter, H.; Hansen, J. R.; Loveland, D. W. (May 3, 1960). "Empirical explorations of the geometry theorem machine". Papers Presented at the May 3-5, 1960, Western Joint IRE-AIEE-ACM Computer Conference. IRE-AIEE-ACM '60 (Western). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 143–149. doi:10.1145/1460361.1460381. ISBN 978-1-4503-7869-7. S2CID 18265039.
9. H, Gelernter (1963). "Realization of A Geometry-Theorem Proving Machine". Computers and Thought: 134–152.
10. "Herbert Gelernter and American Science". National Review. June 6, 2015.
11. Gelernter, H.; Hansen, J. R.; Gerberich, C. L. (April 1, 1960). "A Fortran-Compiled List-Processing Language". Journal of the ACM. 7 (2): 87–101. doi:10.1145/321021.321022. ISSN 0004-5411. S2CID 47551654.
12. LISP prehistory John McCarthy Jul 26th 22:37 PDT 1996 retrieved 17:48(GMT) October 26, 2011 [see also: Lisp (programming language) and John McCarthy
13. Who's Who in Religion, vol. 1, Marquis Who's Who, 1975, p. 343
14. "RUTH LEWIS BETROTHED; Graduate Student at Michigan Fiancee of Herbert Gelernter". The New York Times. October 31, 1951.
15. For a remembrance see "A Life That Made Sense," by David Gelernter, The Weekly Standard, September 7, 2015, at 5.

• American computer scientists
• American artificial intelligence researchers
• 2015 deaths
• Stony Brook University faculty
• People associated with CERN
• 1929 births
• Jewish American scientists