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∂CSL Professor Takayasu Ito
↓Department of Electrical Communications↓Faculty of Engineering
↓Tohoku University↓Sendai JAPAN∞

Dear Professor Ito:

	Thank you for thinking of me in connection with the
Japan prize.  The bibliography and biography you requested
are enclosed.

	Everything important that I've done is reasonably well
documented in papers, but for various reasons I never wrote
a big general paper on the subject, although it is disussed in
several papers mentioned in my bibliography.

	Therefore, I enclose a copy of an early memo on time-sharing,
which I think is the first proposal along these lines and which
has never been published.  Besides that I enclose a historical
memo I wrote about the development of the ideas in preparation for
a videotaped session on the subject organized by Ithiel Pool and
Richard Solomon at M.I.T.  The other participants in the session
seemed to be in substantial agreement with the version of events
mentioned in that memo.

	If you want copies of any of the papers mentioned in my
bibliography, I can supply them.

	Again thanks for your efforts.

.reg

P.S. Perhaps I'd better elaborate a bit more than my c. v. does
on what I imagine my contributions to have been.

1. My 1958 %2Programs with Common Sense%1 initiates the approach
to AI that involves representing common sense facts in mathematical
logic.

2. My 1960 %2Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions ...%1
presents the LISP language.

3. I initiated the concept of time-sharing system in 1958 and
participated in various developments of it.

4. My 1960 %2Checking Mathematical Proofs by Computer%1 initiates
that subject.

5. My 1963 %2A Basis for a Mathematical Theory of Computation%1
initiates the subject of proving program correctness formally
and provides ideas on how to do it for recursive programs.

6. My 1969 paper with Patrick Hayes initiates the situation calculus,
although there were versions in earlier papers.

7. During the 1970s I wrote various papers on philosophical
problems and their relation to AI.

8. In 1977 and again in 1980 I introduced the idea of circumscription
as a method of non-monotonic reasoning.  At present it seems to be
the most popular approach.

I could elaborate all of these points, but this is as much bragging
as I can bring myself to do for now.