Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Bledsoe (November 12, 1921 Maysville, Oklahoma

Maysville, Oklahoma

Maysville is a town in Garvin County, Oklahoma, United States. The population was 1,313 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Maysville is located at ....

, U.S.

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 – October 4, 1995 Austin, Texas

Austin, Texas

Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...

, USA) was a mathematician

Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

, computer scientist

Computer scientist

A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....

, and prominent educator. He is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

, pattern recognition

Pattern recognition

In machine learning, pattern recognition is the assignment of some sort of output value to a given input value , according to some specific algorithm. An example of pattern recognition is classification, which attempts to assign each input value to one of a given set of classes...

, and automated theorem proving

Automated theorem proving

Automated theorem proving or automated deduction, currently the most well-developed subfield of automated reasoning , is the proving of mathematical theorems by a computer program.- Decidability of the problem :...

. Bledsoe died on 4 October 1995 of ALS

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis , also referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a form of motor neuron disease caused by the degeneration of upper and lower neurons, located in the ventral horn of the spinal cord and the cortical neurons that provide their efferent input...

, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

Woody was one of the founders of AI, making early contributions in pattern recognition and automated reasoning. He continued to make significant contributions to AI throughout his long career.

Early Years

Bledsoe was born on 12 November 1921 on a little farm near Maysville, Oklahoma. His father, Thomas, had run a turpentine plantation in Alabama, but in 1917, a fire burned him out. He moved to Oklahoma to try his luck at farming. Woody was the fourth child born to Thomas’s second wife Eva, his first wife having died after raising six children.
Early on, Bledsoe was enthralled by mathematics and recalls spending “hours just roaming around, sometimes working mathematics problems mentally” (Bledsoe 1976). He graduated from high school during that year (1939).
He enrolled at the University of Oklahoma in the spring of 1940. In April, he left the university and joined the United States Army.

Bledsoe joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an adult, and served in the church as a Bishop, counselor to the Stake Presidency, and Stake Patriarch. He also served as a leader in the Boy Scouts of America

Boy Scouts of America

The Boy Scouts of America is one of the largest youth organizations in the United States, with over 4.5 million youth members in its age-related divisions...

.