Bill Gosper Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
R. William Gosper, Jr., known as Bill Gosper, is a mathematician and programmer.Along with Richard Greenblatt, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and holds pride of place in the Lisp community.
Affiliated with the MIT AI Lab during his prime, he performed many programming feats, mainly in, but not restricted to, computational mathematics.
He became intensely interested in the Game of Life shortly after John Horton Conway had proposed it, conjectured on the existence of infinitely growing patterns, and offered a reward for an example. Gosper was the first to find such a pattern, and won the prize. He is also the originator of the hashlife algorithm that can speed up the computation of Life patterns by many orders of magnitude.
He played the leading role in compiling the HAKMEM.
He is also noted for his work on continued fraction representations of real numbers, and for suggesting the algorithm (which bears his name) for finding closed form hypergeometric identities.