The Teacher

I've had the opportunity to speak with Gerry on a couple occasions. He's an incredibly nice and brilliant man. He pulled a postdoc into his office and they talked to me for about an hour on a huge variety of topics. He taught me the Y Combinator, gave me a pocket protector (same as the author's) and signed my copy of SICP. (Hal, unfortunately, was on sabbatical at Google at the time.)

What impressed me about Gerry was the incredibly wide variety of topics he could speak on, not just computer science and electrical engineering but many other hard sciences and I even remember him mentioning something about the ambiguity of ancient Hebrew. He had something intelligent to say about everything. A few other interesting points are that when he was my age (high school) he used his knowledge of chemistry to make explosives for fun, and he had a chair hanging from the ceiling he had built himself. Being around someone that knowledgeable and intelligent has the potential to automatically make you more ambitious, and it's something I recommend every young person do as soon as possible. (PG said something similar about showing founders how to be relentlessly resourceful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508048)

I came back and visited Gerry a few months later for a briefer visit. At the time I was deciding between colleges. He asked me about where I was considering and provided me the most helpful overview of the strengths and weaknesses of each of their cultures. Needless to say, he was a pretty big fan of MIT. ;)

He told me an interesting anecdote about Marvin Minsky that I haven't heard anywhere else so I'll put it here. We were discussing good procrastination. He said Minsky advised putting all mail in a pile, newest on top, and only processing the pile top-down. Then, once a month throw out the bottom half of the pile to save time. "Anything important will come twice," Minsky said.

I was fortunate to have Gerry teaching my section of 6.031 (the predecessor of 6.001). I remember a story he liked to tell about why he thought Marvin Minsky was very smart. Gerry was building some kind of connectionist system -- a neural net or something, I don't recall exactly -- and mentioned to Marvin that he was initializing the weights randomly "so it won't have any preconceptions". Marvin replied, "Of course it will have preconceptions! You just won't know what they are. "

I've never been inspired to do programming from a video more than when watching Sussman doing the HP SICP lectures with Hal Abelson. You can feel him barely contain his enthusiasm for the subject. Truly infectious and all you need to get a boost in order to plough into the next chapter of SICP :-)

I'd love to see Gerry Sussman's talk from Strangeloop this year, does anyone know if a video is likely to be available at some point?

Its amazing to see what impacts a great educator can make on you... I have never met Gerald, but can tell you that there are these gems of educators out there that have single handedly impacted the lives of so many.

I will never forget how my economics professor at my small state college kept a WSJ out for me every day so I could learn about the world outside of our town in Missouri. Every week he would meet with me and would ask me what I learned from it. At a college where 80% students were first generation college students, it was him that really got a lot of people excited about the world...

His name is Dr. Viran Kharadia

I was at MIT when Jerry taught adventures in symbolic programming. pretty fucking awesome class. Also he offers you darjeeling tea if you go to his office. very nice tea.

Sounds lime a gem of a person as well as professor. Thanks for sharing!