Alan Kay
President of Viewpoints Research Institute
2003 Turing Award and 2004 Kyoto Prize recipient

Abstract

Part of the aesthetics of mathematics is to not only find interesting “relationships between relationships” but also to be able to express them as clearly, simply and understandably as possible. The expressions that Maxwell used for his theory of electromagnetic radiation would not fit on a T-shirt, but the eventual use of vectors and new operators (div, curl, etc.) allowed a beautiful more understandable expression of the ideas. Similarly, the expression of Fortran was large and ad hoc, Algol less so, but it was McCarthy’s expression of Lisp in itself that revealed extremely important and beautiful things about a very powerful programming language (and it did fit on a T-shirt!). This led to more compact and powerful ways to think about programming languages, including expressions which include how the relationships could be made to run on a computer.

For some years we have speculated about “how many T-shirts would personal computing require if its parts were redesigned into ‘active mathematics’ ?” Three years ago we started to pursue this question, and are about half way along mathematizing personal computing “from the end-user down to the metal (and a little below)” via creating runable mathematical schemes that are as clear as possible, and in terms of what used to be called “problem oriented languages” using runable metaprogramming.

This is an essay in inventing both “bricks and architecture”. It has great general interest if what needs to be expressed is reduced by 2, 3 or even 4 orders of magnitude. A number of examples of the work in progress will be shown in this short talk.

Biographical Information

Alan Kay is one of the earliest pioneers of object-oriented programming, personal computing, and graphical user interfaces. His contributions have been recognized with the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering “for the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers,” the Alan. M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery “for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing,” and the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation “for creation of the concept of modern personal computing and contribution to its realization.”

Kay has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society of Arts, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Computer History Museum. Other honors include: J-D Warnier Prix d'Informatique, ACM Systems Software Award5, NEC Computers & Communication Foundation Prize, Funai Foundation Prize, Lewis Branscomb Technology Award, the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education, and the CRN Hall of Fame.

Kay has been a Xerox Fellow, Chief Scientist of Atari, Apple Fellow, Disney Fellow, and HP Senior Fellow. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at UCLA. In 2001 he founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to children, learning and advanced systems research.

At Viewpoints Research Institute he and his colleagues continue to explore advanced systems and programming design by aiming for a “Moore’s Law” advance in software creation of many orders of magnitude. Kay and Viewpoints are also deeply involved in the One Laptop Per Child initiative that seeks to create a Dynabook-like “$100 laptop” for every child in the world (especially in the 3rd world).

Outside of computing, Kay entered show business in the 50s as a professional jazz guitarist. Much of his subsequent work combined music and theatrical production. Today he is an avid amateur classical pipe organist and has just taken up jazz guitar again after more than 40 years.

Kay has a BA in Mathematics and Biology with minor concentrations in English and Anthropology from the University of Colorado, 1966. MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science (1968 and 1969, both with distinction) from the University of Utah, and Honorary Doctorates from the Kungl Tekniska Hoegskolan in Stockholm, Sweden, Columbia College in Chicago, Georgia Tech, the University of Pisa in Italy and the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.