David Gelernter

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David Hillel Gelernter (b. 1955) is a professor of computer science at Yale University. In the 1980s, he made seminal contributions to the field of parallel computation, specifically the tuple space coordination model, as embodied by the Linda programming system. Bill Joy attributes Linda as the inspiration for many elements of JavaSpaces and Jini.

He received his Bachelor of Arts and Masters of Arts degrees in classical Hebrew literature from Yale University in 1976 and his Ph.D. from S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook in 1982.

In 1993, he was critically injured opening a mailbomb sent by Theodore Kaczynski, who at that time was an unidentified but violent opponent of technological progress, dubbed by the press as "the Unabomber". He recovered from his injuries but sustained permanent damage to his right hand and eye. He chronicled the ordeal in his 1997 book Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber (1997).

He was one of the founders of the company Mirror Worlds Technologies, which created software using ideas from his book, Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean (1992). Gelernter believed that the computer can free its users from being filing clerks by organizing user's data for them. Unfortunately, there was little commercial success for Mirror Worlds, and the company disbanded in late 2003.

In YYYY, he was nominated to the National Council on the Arts and became a member that year.

Gelernter is a contributor to magazines such as City Journal, The Weekly Standard, and Commentary which are often considered conservative. He was a weekly op-ed columnist for the LA Times but became too busy to continue after seven months, despite garnering enthusiasm from conservatives nationwide.

1 Books
2 Political articles
3 Former Students
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Books

Gelernter, David. Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber. Hardcover ed. Simon & Schuster Adult Pub. Group, 1997.

Gelernter, David H. 1939: the Lost World of the Fair. Paperback ed. HarperCollins Pub., 1996.

Gelernter, David. The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought. Hardcover ed. MacMillan, Inc., 1994.

Gelernter, David. Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean. 1st ed. Oxford Univ. Pr., 1992.

Gelernter, David, and Nicholas Carriero. How to Write Parallel Programs: A first course. Hardcover ed. Mass. Instit. of Tech. Pr., 1990.

Gelernter, David H., David Padua, and Alexandru Nicolau. Language and Compilers for Parallel Computing. Hardcover ed. Mass. Instit. of Tech. Pr., 1990.