David Gelernter - Biography

David Hillel Gelernter (born 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 cites Linda as the inspiration for many elements of JavaSpaces and Jini.

Biography

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. Shortly afterwards he became a practicing Jew; previously he had been secular.

He helped found the company Mirror Worlds Technologies, which in 2001 released Scopeware 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 announced it would "cease operations effective May 15, 2004". A related company Mirror Worlds, LLC recently had their patent infringement verdict against Apple, Inc. overturned in the Eastern District of Texas.

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.

Books

• Judaism: A Way of Being. Yale University Press, 2009.
• Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion. Hardcover ed. Doubleday., 2007.
• Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology. Paperback ed. Perseus Pub., 1998.
• The Aesthetics of Computing. Paperback ed. Phoenix (Orion Books Ltd, UK), 1998.
• 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.

Political articles

• "Americanism - & Its Enemies"

External links

• David Gelernter: Faculty - Computer Science at Yale
• Edge: The Second Coming -- A Manifesto - by David Gelernter
• David Gelernter bio. - National Endowment for the Arts
• David Gelernter profile on Edge.org
• David Gelernter at mathematics genealogy
• "The Images Dancing in David Gelernter's Head", The Chronicle of Education