The 2025 ISSAC conference in Guanajuato, Mexico, marks the 50th event in this significant series, making it an ideal moment to reflect on the field’s history. This paper reviews the formative years of symbolic computation up to 1975, fifty years ago. By revisiting a period unfamiliar to most current participants, this survey aims to shed light on once-pressing issues that are now largely resolved and to highlight how some of today’s challenges were recognized earlier than expected.

Article Free Access Share on Further evaluation of Java for symbolic computation Author: Arthur C. Norman Trinity College, Cambridge CB2 1TQ Trinity College, Cambridge CB2 1TQView Profile Authors Info & Claims ISSAC '00: Proceedings of the 2000 international symposium on Symbolic and algebraic computationJuly 2000Pages 258–265https://doi.org/10.1145/345542.345647Published:01 July 2000Publication History 2citation314DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations2Total Downloads314Last 12 Months7Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

In 1976 Risch [1] proposed a scheme for finding the integrals of forms built up out of transcendental functions that viewed general functions as rational forms in a suitable differential field and represented the polynomial parts of those forms in a distributed rather than recursive way. By using a data representation where all variables were (more or less) equally important this new method seemed to side-step some of the complications that had appeared in his previous scheme [2] where various side-constraints had to be propagated between the levels present in a tower of separate extensions of differential fields, otherwise seen as levels in recursive datastructures.

A variation of the Haddon and Waite compacting garbage collector is presented that needs only bounded workspace, but which has typical runtime proportional to the size of the heap rather than n log n for a heap of size n. The algorithm has been measured in the context of a LISP system where it has been seen to behave close to its optimum. The relationship of this algorithm to one due to Lang and Weigbreit is also explained.

Abstract The problems of producing an efficient but robust implementation of a high‐level language by building on existing compilers are discussed with reference to a LISP system consisting of an interpreter, a compiler and a large collection of support routines. In retrospect it can be seen that almost all of the major difficulties encountered were facets of a general problem concerned with the global control of the use of store. The garbage collector, originally intended solely to manage the LISP heap, extends its scope to simplify the solution of many of these problems.

Given a general analytic set of implicit ordinary differential equations the method described here will find an algorithm for expanding solutions to the equations in power series. The method is entirely mechanical, and does not have to rely on its user for prompting about the order, degree or form of the equations. In simple cases, such as sets of equations that can trivially be reduced to explicit form, the algorithm generated will be that of the Taylor Series method of Barton, Willers and Zahar (1972a,b) and so it can generally be expected to form the bases for effective and efficient numerical procedures.

article Computing with Formal Power Series Share on Author: A. C. Norman University Computer Laboratory, Corn Exchange Street, Cambridge, CB2 3QG, England University Computer Laboratory, Corn Exchange Street, Cambridge, CB2 3QG, EnglandView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Mathematical SoftwareVolume 1Issue 4Dec. 1975 pp 346–356https://doi.org/10.1145/355656.355660Published:01 December 1975 24citation490DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations24Total Downloads490Last 12 Months4Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access