Gerald Jay Sussman (born 1947) is an American computer scientist and professor at MIT. His work on Scheme and SICP defined how generations of programmers learned to think about computation.
Creating Scheme
Working with Guy Steele in the 1970s, Sussman developed Scheme while exploring the actor model. Their realization that actors and closures were equivalent led to Scheme’s elegant minimalism.
SICP
With Harold Abelson, Sussman wrote “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs,” which became MIT’s introductory computer science textbook. SICP taught programming as thinking—using Scheme to explore abstraction, recursion, and metalinguistic design.
AI Research
Sussman contributed to AI research at MIT’s AI Lab, working on constraint propagation, problem solving, and symbolic reasoning. His AI work informed his view of programming as expressing knowledge.
Philosophy of Computing
Sussman views programming as a precise form of communication—not just with computers, but with other humans. Programs should be written primarily for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
Continued Teaching
Sussman continues teaching at MIT, now exploring computational approaches to physics and engineering. His course on classical mechanics uses programming to express physical laws, demonstrating computation as a general tool for thought.