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.
Gelernter received his Bachelor of Arts and Master 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, Gelernter was critically injured opening a mailbomb sent by Theodore Kaczynski, who at that time was an unidentified but violent opponent of technology, dubbed by the press as "the Unabomber". He recovered from his injuries but his right hand and eye were permanently damaged. He chronicled the ordeal in his 1997 book Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber.
He helped found 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 computers can free users from being filing clerks by organizing their data. The company saw few sales, and disbanded in late 2003.
In 2003, he was nominated to and became a member of the National Council on the Arts.
In 2006, Gelernter joined the scientific advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation.
Gelernter contributes to magazines such as City Journal, The Weekly Standard, and Commentary which are generally considered neoconservative. For seven months, he contributed a weekly op-ed column to the LA Times.
[edit] Books
- Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion. Hardcover ed. Doubleday., 2007.
- Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology. Paperback ed. Perseus Pub., 1999.
- Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber. Hardcover ed. Simon & Schuster Adult Pub. Group, 1997.
- 1939: the Lost World of the Fair. Paperback ed. HarperCollins Pub., 1996.
- The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought. Hardcover ed. MacMillan, Inc., 1994.
- 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.
- With Nicholas Carriero. How to Write Parallel Programs: A first course. Hardcover ed. Mass. Instit. of Tech. Pr., 1990.
- With David Padua and Alexandru Nicolau. Language and Compilers for Parallel Computing. Hardcover ed. Mass. Instit. of Tech. Pr., 1990.
- With Suresh Jagannathan. Programming Linguistics. Hardcover ed. Mass. Instit. of Tech., 1990.
