In 1975 Steele recieved an A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College and his S.M. and Ph.D. in computer science and artificial intelligence from M.I.T. (1977 and 1980). He now works at Sun working on the Java spec, parallel alorithms and more. He is also the chairman of the Common Lisp standards commitee. He REALLY likes chess and sung bass in the MIT choral society.