Harry R. Lewis

Harry Roy Lewis (born 1947) is an American computer scientist, mathe­ma­ti­cian, and uni­ver­sity admin­i­stra­tor known for his research in com­pu­ta­tional logic, textbooks in theoretical computer science, and writings on computing, higher education, and technology. He is Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, and was Dean of Harvard College from 1995 to 2003. Essentially all of Lewis's career has been at Harvard, where he has been honored for his "particularly distinguished contributions to undergraduate teaching"; his students have included future entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and numerous future faculty members at Harvard and other schools. The website "Six Degrees to Harry Lewis", created by Zuckerberg while at Harvard, was a precursor to Facebook.

Education and career

Lewis was born in Boston and grew up in Wellesley, Massa­chu­setts. His parents were physicians – his father a hospital chief of anesthesiology and his mother the head of the Dever State School for intel­lec­tu­ally disabled children. His father was a World War II veteran and the son of a German Lutheran father and a Russian Jewish mother. After graduating summa cum laude at the end of the eleventh grade at Boston's Roxbury Latin School he entered Harvard College, where he was for a time a third-string lacrosse goalie. Lewis has said that he discovered "I wasn't a real math­e­ma­ti­cian [once] I got out of the amateur leagues of high school mathematics", but was "tremendously excited" by the computer-science research oppor­tu­nities at Harvard.[L2]As a senior he lectured a graduate class using a computer-graphics program, SHAPE­SHIFTER, which he had developed for displaying complex-plane trans­for­ma­tions on a cathode ray tube. SHAPE­SHIFTER automatically recognized formulas and commands hand-entered via a stylus on a RAND tablet, and could be "trained" to recognize the handwriting of individual users. There being no degree program in computer science per se at Harvard at the time,[L2] in 1968 Lewis received his BA (summa, Quincy House) in applied mathematics and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After serving for two years in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps as a commissioned officer in the role of mathematician and computer scientist for the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, he spent a year in Europe as a Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellow. He then returned to Harvard, where he earned his M.A. in 1973 and PhD in 1974, after which he was immediately appointed assistant professor of computer science. He became an associate professor in 1978, and Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in 1981. Lewis formally retired in 2020, but continues to teach as Gordon McKay Research Professor in Computer Science. His wife Marlyn McGrath retired in 2021 after 42 years as Harvard College's director of admissions. The Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath Professorship of Engineering and Applied Sciences was endowed by one of Lewis's former students in 2012.

Teaching

Lewis has pointed out that – largely because his career began when the field of computer science "barely existed", and Harvard offered almost no computer science courses at the undergraduate level – he originated almost all the courses he has taught. It was his proposal, in the late 1970s, that Harvard create a major specifically for computer science (which until then had been a branch of Harvard's applied mathematics program).[L2] From 2003 to 2008 he was designated a Harvard College Professor in recognition of "particularly distinguished contributions to undergraduate teaching". In 2021 the IEEE Computer Society awarded him its annual Mary Kenneth Keller Computer Science & Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award, citing "his over forty-year dedication towards undergraduate computer science education at Harvard, his authoring of Computer Science introductory textbooks, and his mentoring of many future educators." Six of his teaching assistants are now members of the Harvard faculty and many others are professors of computer science (or related disciplines) elsewhere; many have gone on to win teaching awards themselves, including Eric Roberts (Association for Computing Machinery Karlstrom Award), Nicholas Horton (Robert V. Hogg Award), Joseph A. Konstan (University of Minnesota Distinguished University Teaching Professor, Graduate/Professional Teaching Award), and Margo Seltzer (Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, Phi Beta Kappa teaching award, Abramson Teaching Award). His undergraduate students have included Mark Zuckerberg (whose website "Six Degrees to Harry Lewis" was a precursor to Facebook – six degrees being a reference to the small world hypothesis), Microsoft founder Bill Gates (who solved an open theoretical problem Lewis had described in class), and nine future Harvard professors. Lewis is the author or coauthor of five textbooks:

An Introduction to Computer Programming and Data Structures using MACRO-11 (1981).[L81] MACRO-11 was an assembly language for PDP-11 computers. Elements of the Theory of Computation (1981, with Christos H. Papadimitriou)[LP81] covers automata theory, computational complexity theory, and the theory of formal languages; its inclusion of complexity theory and mathematical logic was innovative for its time. It has been called an "excellent traditional text" but one whose terse and heavily mathematical style can be intimidating. Although intended for undergraduates, it has also been used for introductory graduate courses. Data Structures and Their Algorithms (1991, with Larry Denenberg).[LD] Essential Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science (2019, with Rachel Zax). Ideas that Created the Future (2021), a collection of "forty-six classic papers in computer science that map the evolution of the field." Lewis has also taught a course on amateur athletics and the social history of sports in America.

Dean of Harvard College

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