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Gerald Jay Sussman is a computer scientist whose work includes the design and explanation of systems expressed as programs. With Hal Abelson and Julie Sussman, he authored Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and others, a text that develops programming abstraction, recursion and models of program execution through Scheme.^[ref]

One useful distinction in the text is between the shape of a procedure's source and the computation it generates. A syntactically recursive procedure can produce an iterative process when no deferred operations accumulate. That makes the execution model, rather than the presence of a self-call alone, central to reasoning about storage.^[ref]

Biography: www.csail.mit.edu/person/gerald-sussman

Hal Abelson is a computer scientist whose work uses computer programming as a way to express and investigate ideas. With Gerald Jay Sussman, he developed the course behind Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and others. Its use of Scheme connects concrete programs with programming abstraction, recursion and the organization of computations.^[ref]

His work on Logo and computational geometry also brought mathematical exploration into programming education. Rather than treating a program only as a sequence of commands, this approach lets a learner examine how a compact procedure generates an entire family of behaviours.^[ref]

Biography: groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/hal/bio.html