Edward A. Feigenbaum is an American computer scientist, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University, where he founded the Heuristic Programming Project. He earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon under Herbert Simon, writing the first computer simulation of human learning, and joined the Stanford faculty in 1965. He is often called “the father of expert systems” for his pioneering work on AI programs that capture and apply specialist knowledge.
In 1965 Feigenbaum, with the Nobel laureate biologist Joshua Lederberg, started DENDRAL, a program that inferred the molecular structure of organic compounds from mass-spectrometry data. DENDRAL is widely regarded as the first expert system: rather than relying on general reasoning, it encoded the specific rules a human chemist would use. This approach, knowledge as the key to machine performance, became the template for the expert-systems industry of the 1970s and 1980s. Feigenbaum received the ACM Turing Award in 1994 (shared with Raj Reddy) for this work.
For the library’s reader, Feigenbaum anchors a whole arc of AI history. The expert-systems boom he helped start promised that businesses could bottle the judgment of their best people in software, and for a while it sold. The later collapse of that market, the “expert-systems bust,” is part of the same story: it showed how brittle hand-coded knowledge could be, and why the field eventually turned toward systems that learn from data instead.