Hal Abelson
Harold "Hal" Abelson (born April 26, 1947 ) is an American computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Abelson graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor's degree and received his PhD in mathematics from MIT with Dennis Sullivan . He is Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT.
At MIT, he was in the development of geometry teaching by Logo of Seymour Papert and its turtle graphics active (he also implemented in the early 1980s logo on the Apple II and wrote books to do so) and developed with Gerald Jay Sussman the introductory course on computer science, which was the subject of her influential book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs . With Sussman, he also directed the MIT Project on Mathematics and Computation (Tools for Scientific Computing).
Later he worked with Google (sabbatical year 2009) in the App Inventor project, a development environment for the Android operating system, which should also allow inexperienced users to program web applications. It is intended for mobile computers and is being further developed at the MIT Center for Mobile Learning.
He has received several awards for his achievements in computer science education: in 1992 he received the Bose Award (the prize for teaching at the School of Engineering at MIT), in 1995 the Taylor L. Booth Education Award of the IEEE Computer Society, and in 2011 the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award and in 2012 the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education. He was on the MIT Council for Educational Technology and was involved in the development of Open Courseware at MIT.
On behalf of MIT, he investigated the Aaron Swartz case in 2013 .
In 2001 he was one of the founders of Creative Commons and is a founding member of the Free Software Foundation and is on its board of directors. In 1992 he was one of the six MacVicar Faculty Fellows at MIT. He was the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a non-profit organization in Washington DC
He is a fellow of the IEEE .
Fonts (selection)
- with Nat Goodman, Lee Rudolph: LOGO Manual, MIT 1974
- with Andrea diSessa: Turtle Geometry: The Computer As a Medium for Exploring Mathematics. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1981.
- Introduction to Logo, iwt 1981
- Logo for the Apple II, Byte Books 1982
- with Gerald Jay Sussman : Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, MIT Press, McGraw Hill 1985, 1996
- German edition: Structure and implementation of computer programs: a computer science introduction, 3rd edition, Springer 1998
- with Harry R. Lewis: Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion Addison-Wesley, 2008.
- with David Wolber, Ellen Spertus, Liz Looney: App inventor: create your own Android apps, O'Reilly 2011
Web links
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Abelson, Hal |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Abelson, Harold |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American computer scientist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 26, 1947 |