Paul W. Abrahams

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Paul W. Abrahams,

an American mathematician, consulting computer scientist, and past president of the Association for Computing Machinery. Paul W. Abrahams received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1956, and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1963 on Machine Verification of Mathematical Proof, both from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying artificial intelligence under Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy. He is one of the designers of the first Lisp system and also the designer of the CIMS PL/I system.

Mate-in-two#

In the 2007 interview with Arthur Norberg, Abrahams mentioned that he met Claude Shannon and was working with him and McCarthy — on a chess program [1]:

And I also met [Claude Shannon](Claude_Shannon "Claude Shannon") and was working with him and [McCarthy](John_McCarthy "John McCarthy") — on a chess program. It calculated two-move mates and was written in [FORTRAN](Fortran "Fortran"). That was also the time that FORTRAN was starting to hit the world.  

Kotok-McCarthy#

Paul W. Abrahams’ routines were used in the Kotok-McCarthy-Program, as mentioned in Alan Kotok’s memo and thesis about the program [2] [3]:

In the fall of 1960 the chess group, without [Mr. Berlekamp](Elwyn_Berlekamp "Elwyn Berlekamp"), began planning for the general chess program. It was decided to retain the original McCarthy/Abrahams move routines, and to continue coding in [FORTRAN](Fortran "Fortran")  and FAP. The program was to be a variable [depth](Depth "Depth") search with a "stable position" termination. An [evaluation](Evaluation "Evaluation") was to be made at the terminal points of the move tree. This evaluation would be a weighted sum of such criteria as [material balance](Material "Material"), [center control](Center_Control "Center Control"), [pawn structure](Pawn_Structure "Pawn Structure"), "[tempo](Tempo "Tempo")" advantage, and [development](Development "Development"). 

Selected Publications#

[4]

1960 …#

• John McCarthy, Paul W. Abrahams, Daniel Edwards, Timothy Hart, Michael Levin (1962) LISP 1.5 Programmer’s Manual. The M.I.T. Press, second edition (1985) as pdf [5]
• Paul W. Abrahams (1963). Machine Verification of Mathematical Proof. Ph.D. Thesis in Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Paul W. Abrahams (1966). A final solution to the Dangling else of ALGOL 60 and related languages. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 9, No. 9
• Paul W. Abrahams (1968). Symbol Manipulation Languages. Advances in Computers 9

1970 …#

• Paul W. Abrahams (1974). Some Remarks on Lookup of Structured Variables. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 17, No. 4
• Paul W. Abrahams (1979). The CIMS PL/I compiler. SIGPLAN Symposium on Compiler Construction

1980 …#

• Paul W. Abrahams (1983). Subset/G PL/I and the PL/I Standard. ACM Annual Conference 1983
• Paul W. Abrahams (1988). Some sad remarks about string handling in C. SIGPLAN Notices Vol. 23, No. 10
• Paul W. Abrahams (1988). The Strategic Defense Initiative - President’s Letter. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 31, No. 6

1990 …#

• Paul W. Abrahams, Kathryn A. Hargreaves, Karl Berry (1990). TEX for the Impatient. Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-51375-7, pdf, google, amazon [6]
• Paul W. Abrahams (1993). Typographical Extensions for Programming Languages: Breaking out of the ASCII Straitjacket. SIGPLAN Notices 28(2)
• Paul W. Abrahams, Bruce R. Larson (1996). Unix for the Impatient. Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-82376-4, google, amozon

2000 …#

• Arthur Norberg (2007). Paul W. Abrahams Interview.

External Links#

• The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Paul W. Abrahams
• InformIT: Paul W. Abrahams
• ACM: Fellows Award / Paul W Abrahams

References#

1. ↑ Arthur Norberg (2007). Paul W. Abrahams Interview.
2. ↑ Alan Kotok (1962). Artificial Intelligence Project - MIT Computation Center: Memo 41 - A Chess Playing Program. pdf
3. ↑ Alan Kotok (1962). A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 7090. B.S. Thesis, MIT, AI Project Memo 41, Computation Center, Cambridge MA. pdf
4. ↑ dblp: Paul W. Abrahams
5. ↑ McCarthy et al. LISP 1.5 Programmer’s Manual. from The Computer History Museum Software Preservation Group
6. ↑ TeX from Wikipedia

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