Textbook of AI

1934–2023, AI researcher

Also known as: James R. Slagle

James R. Slagle was an American AI researcher whose 1961 MIT PhD thesis produced SAINT (Symbolic Automatic INTegrator), a program that performed symbolic integration of elementary functions at the level of a competent freshman calculus student. SAINT represented integration as a search problem in which heuristics chose among standard transformations (substitution, integration by parts, partial fractions). It was the first significant computer-algebra system and a direct ancestor of MACSYMA, Maple, Mathematica, and modern automated mathematics tools.

Slagle was blind from age 20 (retinitis pigmentosa) and worked through the bulk of his career using human readers and Braille. He moved from MIT to the National Institutes of Health, the Naval Research Laboratory and ultimately the University of Minnesota, contributing to expert systems and machine learning research throughout.