David Wheeler

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This article is about David John Wheeler; other David Wheelers include David A. Wheeler and David Wheeler (actor).

David John Wheeler (9 February 1927 – 13 December 2004) was a computer scientist. He was born in Birmingham and gained a scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge to read mathematics, graduating in 1948.

His contributions to the field included work on the EDSAC and the Burrows-Wheeler transform. Along with Maurice Wilkes and Stanley Gill he is credited with the invention of the subroutine (which they referred to as the closed subroutine). In cryptography, he was the designer of WAKE and the co-designer of the TEA and XTEA encryption algorithms together with Roger Needham.

Wheeler married Joyce Blackler in August 1957, who herself used EDSAC for her own mathematical investigations as a research student from 1955. He became a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge in 1964 and formally retired in 1994, although he continued to be an active member of the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge University until his death.

Wheeler is often quoted as saying "Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection. But that usually will create another problem." Another quotation attributed to him is "Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes."