astronomy

Matthias Felleisen

Matthias Felleisen is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Matthias Felleisen rather than just read about it. In short: Matthias Felleisen is a German-American computer science professor and author. He grew up in Germany and immigrated to the US in his twenties.

Key takeaways

Matthias Felleisen belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Matthias Felleisen to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Matthias Felleisen from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Matthias Felleisen is a German-American computer science professor and author. He grew up in Germany and immigrated to the US in his twenties. He received his PhD from Indiana University Bloomington under the direction of Daniel P. Friedman. After serving as professor for 14 years in the Computer Science Department of Rice University, Felleisen joined the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts as Trustee Professor. Felleisen's interests include programming languages, including programming tools, program design, software contracts, and many more. In the 1990s, Felleisen launched PLT and TeachScheme! (later ProgramByDesign and eventually giving rise to the Bootstrap project ) with the goal of teaching program-design principles to beginners and to explore the use of Scheme to produce large systems. As part of this effort, he authored How to Design Programs (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press (MIT Press), 2001) with Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, and Shriram Krishnamurthi.

Research Felleisen's research on the theory of programming languages yielded the widely used reduction semantics, generalizing the Lambda calculus. The most common use concerns proofs of Type soundness as illustrated by the high citation count. A collaboration with Pierre Louis Curien and Robert Cartwright produced the first sequential and algebraically generated denotational semantics for a higher-order language Also see Denotational semantics and its discussion of game semantics. Felleisen's work on the practice of programming languages includes a range of results. His dissertation proposed the idea of Delimited continuation, an idea that by now is realized in a several contemporary languages using several different techniques, including JavaScript, OCaml, Scala (programming language), and Racket (programming language). Additionally, his theory of delimited continuations started a collaboration with Sabry and produced the A-normal (intermediate) form for compilers. Thes result was selected for the 20-years anniversary collection of the PLDI conference. With Findler, Felleisen generalized software contracts to higher-order languages. Finally, Tobin-Hochstadt and Felleisen used these higher-order contracts to create Typed Racket, the first full-fledged language with a gradual typing system contemporary with Siek and Waha's theoretical effort and coining of the phrase. Around 1990, Felleisen investigated the expressive power of programming languages in an effort to understand why programmers may prefer one full-fledged programming language over another. While formal language theory equates all languages that can realize Turing machines, practicing programmers reject this notion and tend to attribute different levels of expressivity to different languages. Felleisen's theory restricts the translations from one language to another to those that affect only ``local'' (module) pieces of code, that is, those pieces that an individual programmer can edit. By contrast, formal language theory allows any translation between two languages, which explains why it equates more than Felleisen's theory. --- Over the past five years Christos Dimoulas of Northwestern and Felleisen have tried to make a similar argument using empirical research. The key idea is to investigate how much information a language feature delivers in the various work situations that developers encounter. At an abstract level, this research resembles the work on pragmatics by natural linguists.

Awards and honors Felleisen gave the keynote addresses at the 2011 Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2010 International Conference on Functional Programming, 2004 European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming and the 2001 Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, and several other conferences and workshops on computer science. In 2006, he was inducted as a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 2009, he received the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award from the ACM. In 2010, he received the SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education from the ACM. In 2012, he received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award for "significant and lasting contribution to the field of programming languages" including small-step operational semantics for control and state, first-class and delimited continuations, mixin classes and mixin modules, a fully abstract semantics for Sequential PCF, web programming techniques, higher-order contracts with blame, and static typing for dynamic languages. In 2018, Felleisen received the ACM SIGPLAN's Programming Languages Software Award (jointly with the rest of the Racket core team).

Books Felleisen co-authored:

Realm of Racket. No Starch Press. 2013. ISBN 978-1593274917. Semantics Engineering with PLT Redex. MIT Press. 2009. ISBN 978-0-262-06275-6. How to Design Programs (2nd ed.). MIT Press. 2018. 1st ed. 2001. How to Design Classes (Draft ed.). 2012 A Little Java, A Few Patterns. MIT Press. 1998. ISBN 0-262-56115-8. The Little MLer. MIT Press. 1998. ISBN 0-262-56114-X. The Little Schemer (4th ed.). MIT Press. 1996. ISBN 0-262-56099-2. The Seasoned Schemer. MIT Press. 1996. ISBN 0-262-56100-X. The Little Lisper. MIT Press. 1987. ISBN 0-262-56038-0.

References

External links Matthias at Northeastern University Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Matthias Felleisen

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Matthias Felleisen claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Matthias Felleisen before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Matthias Felleisen ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Matthias Felleisen

In research: Matthias Felleisen appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Matthias Felleisen in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Matthias Felleisen is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics American instructional writers, Computer science educators, Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Matthias Felleisen outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Matthias Felleisen in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Matthias Felleisen means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Matthias Felleisen out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Matthias Felleisen in simple terms?

Matthias Felleisen is a German-American computer science professor and author. He grew up in Germany and immigrated to the US in his twenties.

Why does Matthias Felleisen matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Matthias Felleisen?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Matthias Felleisen.