Editing Douglas Lenat (section)

==Background and education==
Lenat was born in [[Philadelphia]], United States, on September 13, 1950.{{r|NYT}} When he was 5, the family moved to [[Wilmington, Delaware]], where his father, Nathan Lenat, owned a [[Bottling company|bottling plant]].{{r|NYT}}  His father died when he was 13 and the family then returned to Pennsylvania, where he attended [[Cheltenham High School]].{{r|NYT}}  His after-school job was cleaning rat cages and goose pens at [[Beaver College]] which motivated him to learn programming as a better occupation.{{r|NYT}}

He attended the [[University of Pennsylvania]], supporting himself by programming, including the design and development of a [[natural language interface]] for a [[United States Navy]] online [[operations manual]].  He graduated with [[bachelor's degree]]s in Mathematics and Physics, and a [[master's degree]] in Applied Mathematics, all in 1972.{{r|NYT}}

<!-- For his senior thesis, advised in part by [[Dennis Gabor]], was to bounce acoustic waves in the 40 MHz range off real-world objects, record their interference patterns on a 2-meter square plot, photo-reduce those to a 10-mm square film image, shine a laser through the film, and thus project the three-dimensional imaged object—i.e., the first known acoustic [[Holography|hologram]].{{cn|date=September 2023}} To settle an argument with Dr. Gabor, Lenat computer-generated a five-dimensional hologram, by photo-reducing computer printout of the interference pattern of a globe rotating and expanding over time, reducing the large two-dimensional paper printout to a moderately large 5-cm square film surface through which a conventional laser beam was then able to project a three-dimensional image, which changed in two independent ways (rotating and changing in size) as the film was moved up-down or left-right.{{cn|date=September 2023}} 

(I have done an extensive search and can't find any information about his holograms, or his senior thesis, or his relation to Gabor, so unless someone can find a good citation, I'm making it invisible.)
-->

Lenat was a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Stanford University, where his published research included automatic [[program synthesis]] from input/output pairs and from natural language clarification dialogues.<ref name="PR" />