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∂AIL Professor Paul C. Gilmore, Head↓Department of Computer Science
↓University of British Columbia↓Vancouver, B.C., CANADA V6T 1W5∞

Dear Paul:

	As I told you on the phone, I was acquainted only with
one paper of Ray Reiter's, "A Logic for Default Reasoning" and
my opinion of this paper was very high.  It is the most mathematically
sustained treatment of non-monotonic reasoning in the special
issue of %2Artificial Intelligence%1 devoted to that subject.

	I did not expect that I would be able to read many of the
other papers you sent me, but I was pleasantly surprised to find
them both mathematically sophisticated and genuinely relevant to
the applied topics treated.

	"On reasoning by default" is an excellent introduction
to the subject, and I learned a lot about databases, a subject
which I have been resisting, from Reiter's "Equality and Domain
Closure in First-Order Databases".

	I didn't read the papers on automatic proving, because
that field long ago became to technically complex for me.

	Reiter is one of the very few people in the world who
can maintain both mathematical precision and relevance to
artificial intelligence and computer science generally in his
work.  Most of the mathematically competent work pursues
mathematical will-o-the-wisps that are irrelevant to AI.

	I can give him an unqualified recommendation for promotion
to full professor.

.sgn