William Frederick Schelter (1947 – July 30, 2001) was a professor of mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin and a Lisp developer and programmer. Schelter is credited with the development of the GNU Common Lisp (gcl) implementation of Common Lisp and the GPL'd version of the computer algebra system Macsyma called GNU Maxima. Schelter authored Austin Kyoto Common Lisp (AKCL) under contract with IBM. AKCL formed the foundation for Axiom, another computer algebra system. AKCL eventually became GNU Common Lisp. He is also credited with the first port of the GNU C compiler to the INTEL 386 architecture, used in the original implementation of the Linux kernel .
Schelter obtained his Ph.D. at McGill University in 1972. His mathematical specialties were noncommutative ring theory and computational algebra and its applications, including automated theorem proving in geometry.
In the summer of 2001, age 54, he died suddenly of a heart attack while traveling in Russia.
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“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)