William Frederick Schelter (1947 – July 30, 2001) was a professor of

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

The University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 students as of fall 2 ...

and a

Lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

developer and

programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles Software development, ''software developer'' and Software engineering, ''software engineer' ...

. Schelter is credited with the development of the

GNU Common Lisp GNU Common Lisp (GCL) is the GNU Project's ANSI Common Lisp compiler, an evolutionary development of Kyoto Common Lisp. It produces native object code by first generating C code and then calling a C compiler. GCL is the implementation of cho ...

(GCL) implementation of

Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S2018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperli ...

and the

GPL The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first c ...

'd version of the

computer algebra system A computer algebra system (CAS) or symbolic algebra system (SAS) is any mathematical software with the ability to manipulate mathematical expressions in a way similar to the traditional manual computations of mathematicians and scientists. The de ...

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 and ...

called Maxima. Schelter authored

Austin Kyoto Common Lisp Kyoto Common Lisp (KCL) is an implementation of Common Lisp by Taichi Yuasa and Masami Hagiya, written in C to run under Unix-like operating systems. KCL is compiled to ANSI C. It conforms to Common Lisp as described in the 1984 first editio ...

(AKCL) under contract with

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

. AKCL formed the foundation for

Axiom An axiom, postulate, or assumption is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments. The word comes from the Ancient Greek word (), meaning 'that which is thought worthy or ...

, another computer algebra system. AKCL eventually became GNU Common Lisp. He is also credited with the first port of the

GNU C compiler The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a collection of compilers from the GNU Project that support various programming languages, hardware architectures, and operating systems. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) distributes GCC as free software ...

to the

Intel 386 The Intel 386, originally released as the 80386 and later renamed i386, is the third-generation x86 architecture microprocessor from Intel. It was the first 32-bit processor in the line, making it a significant evolution in the x86 architect ...

architecture, used in the original implementation of the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

.
Schelter obtained his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

McGill University McGill University (French: Université McGill) is an English-language public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill University, Vol. I. For the Advancement of Learning, ...

in 1972. His mathematical specialties were

noncommutative ring In mathematics, a noncommutative ring is a ring whose multiplication is not commutative; that is, there exist ''a'' and ''b'' in the ring such that ''ab'' and ''ba'' are different. Equivalently, a ''noncommutative ring'' is a ring that is not ...

theory and

computational algebra A computation is any type of arithmetic or non-arithmetic calculation that is well-defined. Common examples of computation are mathematical equation solving and the execution of computer algorithms. Mechanical or electronic devices (or, historica ...

and its applications, including

automated theorem proving Automated theorem proving (also known as ATP or automated deduction) is a subfield of automated reasoning and mathematical logic dealing with proving mathematical theorems by computer programs. Automated reasoning over mathematical proof was a majo ...

in geometry. In the summer of 2001, age 54, he died suddenly of a

heart attack A myocardial infarction (MI), commonly known as a heart attack, occurs when Ischemia, blood flow decreases or stops in one of the coronary arteries of the heart, causing infarction (tissue death) to the heart muscle. The most common symptom ...

while traveling in

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

References

* S. Chou and W. Schelter. ''Proving Geometry Theorems with Rewrite Rules'' Journal of Automated Reasoning, 1986.

External links

*
Maxima homepage. Maxima is now available under GPL
1947 births 2001 deaths Lisp (programming language) people 20th-century American mathematicians American computer programmers University of Texas at Austin faculty McGill University Faculty of Science alumni {{US-mathematician-stub