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C00002 00002	@make(letterhead,Phone"497-4330",Who "John McCarthy", Logo Old, Department CSD)                    
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@make(letterhead,Phone"497-4330",Who "John McCarthy", Logo Old, Department CSD)                    
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@begin(address)
Prof. Bruce J. McDonald, Chairman
Computer Science Department
San Francisco State University
1600 Holloway Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94132
@end(address)
@greeting(Dear Prof. McDonald:)
@begin (body)
         
	Vladimir Lifschitz has asked me to recommend him to you for a
position in computer science.  My contact with him has been limited.
I met him several times when he was at Stanford working for Prof.
Patrick Suppes, when he took a summer course I taught at U.C. Santa Cruz
and more recently while he is in the Bay Area.  Only the more
recent acquaintance is worth mentioning.

	He has become interested in circumscription, a mode of
non-monotonic reasoning I invented in the 1970s and published in
1980.  It presents many technical problems of a mathematical
logical character such as when the second order circumscription
formula is equivalent to a formula of first order logic.  Lifschitz
has tackled these logical problems with enthusiasm and has already
(since last summer) obtained several interesting results.

	On the basis of this interest and these results I can
say that he is well equipped to apply his excellent knowledge
of mathematical logic to the solution of applied problems in
computer science and specifically in artificial intelligence.
I am sure he has other talents also, but I don't know about them.
@end(body)
Sincerely,
 
   
    
John McCarthy
Professor of Computer Science