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.

=Kotok-McCarthy= Paul W. Abrahams contributed to the Kotok-McCarthy-Program, as mentioned in Alan Kotok's memo and thesis about the program : In the fall of 1960 the chess group, without Mr. 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 and FAP. The program was to be a variable depth search with a "stable position" termination. An 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, center control, pawn structure, "tempo" advantage, and development.

=Selected Publications=
 * John McCarthy, Paul W. Abrahams, Daniel J. Edwards, Timothy P. Hart and Michael I. Levin (1962) LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual. The M.I.T. Press, second edition (1985) as pdf
 * 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
 * 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
 * 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
 * Paul W. Abrahams, Kathryn A. Hargreaves, Karl Berry (1990). TEX for the Impatient. Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-51375-7, pdf, google, amazon
 * 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
 * Arthur Norberg (2007). Paul W. Abrahams Interview. pdf

=External Links=
 * The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Paul W. Abrahams
 * InformIT: Paul W. Abrahams
 * ACM: Fellows Award / Paul W Abrahams

=References=

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