William A. Martin was a computer scientist

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 from Oklahoma City

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Oklahoma City is the capital and the largest city in the state of Oklahoma. The county seat of Oklahoma County, the city ranks 31st among United States cities in population. The city's population, from the 2010 census, was 579,999, with a metro-area population of 1,252,987 . In 2010, the Oklahoma...

, Oklahoma

Oklahoma

Oklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...

.

After graduating from Northwest Classen High School

Northwest Classen High School

Northwest Classen High School is a public high school serving students in grades 9-12 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.- History :Northwest Classen High School was built in 1955 to accommodate the growing population in the northwest corridor of Oklahoma City. Along with Classen School of Advanced...

, where he was a state wrestling

Wrestling

Wrestling is a form of grappling type techniques such as clinch fighting, throws and takedowns, joint locks, pins and other grappling holds. A wrestling bout is a physical competition, between two competitors or sparring partners, who attempt to gain and maintain a superior position...

 champion, he attended MIT where he received a bachelor's degree (1960), master's (1962) and a Ph.D. (1967) in electrical engineering

Electrical engineering

Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...

. While obtaining those degrees, he worked as a teaching assistant

Teaching assistant

A teaching assistant is an individual who assists a professor or teacher with instructional responsibilities. TAs include graduate teaching assistants , who are graduate students; undergraduate teaching assistants , who are undergraduate students; secondary school TAs, who are either high school...

 at MIT (beginning in 1960). He became an assistant professor in 1968 and was promoted to associate professor of electrical engineering in 1972. In 1975, he received academic tenure

Tenure

Tenure commonly refers to life tenure in a job and specifically to a senior academic's contractual right not to have his or her position terminated without just cause.-19th century:...

. He held a joint appointment at the MIT Sloan School of Management

MIT Sloan School of Management

The MIT Sloan School of Management is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts....

.

His research pulled him towards the Project MAC

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...

, which became the Laboratory for Computer Science and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he researched expert system

Expert system

In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning about knowledge, like an expert, and not by following the procedure of a developer as is the case in...

s.

After finishing a Ph.D. dissertation on symbolic mathematics, Martin co-founded the Macsyma

Macsyma

Macsyma is a computer algebra system that was originally developed from 1968 to 1982 at MIT as part of Project MAC and later marketed commercially...

 project in 1968 and directed it until 1971. Macsyma later became a successful commercial product and is also the core of the free Maxima system.

Martin then worked in automatic programming

Automatic programming

In computer science, the term automatic programming identifies a type of computer programming in which some mechanism generates a computer program to allow human programmers to write the code at a higher abstraction level....

, knowledge representation

Knowledge representation

Knowledge representation is an area of artificial intelligence research aimed at representing knowledge in symbols to facilitate inferencing from those knowledge elements, creating new elements of knowledge...

 and natural language processing

Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....

.

External links

• Obituary from Tech Talk