Matthias Felleisen

Matthias Felleisen
Felleisen speaking at the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages in Madrid, Spain in 2010
Born	Germany
Citizenship	United States
Education	Ph.D., Indiana University Bloomington (1984–1987) Diplom. Wi. Ing., Technische Universität Karlsruhe (1978–1983) Master of Science, University of Arizona, Tucson (1980–1981)
Known for	Founder of PLT, operational semantics, type safety, continuations, gradual typing, A-normal form
Awards	ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Award, ACM Fellow
Scientific career
Fields	Computer scientist
Institutions	Rice University Northeastern University
Thesis	The Calculi of Lambda_v-CS Conversion: A Syntactic Theory of Control and State in Imperative Higher-Order Programming Languages
Doctoral advisor	Daniel P. Friedman

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.^[1] In the 1990s, Felleisen launched PLT and TeachScheme! (later ProgramByDesign and eventually giving rise to the Bootstrap project ^[2]) 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.

Felleisen gave the keynote addresses at the 2011 Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2010 International Conference on Functional Programming,^[3] 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.^[4] 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"^[5] including small-step operational semantics for control and state, 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).^[6]

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.
• 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.

• Matthias at Northeastern University
• Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University