Dr. David Gelernter
Dr. David Gelernter is professor of computer science at Yale,
contributing editor at the
Weekly Standard and member of the National Council of the Arts. He’s
the author of several books and many technical articles; also essays,
art criticism and fiction.
The “tuple spaces” introduced
in Carriero
and Gelernter’s Linda system (1983) are the basis of many
computer-communication and distributed programming systems worldwide.
Mirror Worlds (1991) “foresaw” the World Wide Web (Reuters,
3/20/01)
and was “one of the inspirations for Java”; the “lifestreams” system
(first implemented by Eric Freeman at Yale) is the basis for Mirror
Worlds Technologies’ software. “Breaking out of the box” (NY Times
magazine, ‘97) forecast and described the advent of less-ugly computers
(Apple’s iMac arrived in ‘98). His essays are widely
anthologized (for example in J. Brockman, ed.,
The Next Fifty Years:
new essays from 25 of the world’s leading scientists (Vintage,
2002),
R. Stolley, ed.,
Life Magazine – Century of Change, (Little Brown,
2001), and the ACM’s 50th Anniversary collection).
He’s the author of
The Muse in the Machine (1994, about poetry and
AI), the novel
1939 (1995),
Machine Beauty (1998, about aesthetics
and technology) and other books; he’s published in Commentary, ArtNews,
Washington Post and many others. Recent talks include the Bradley
Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, keynotes at Agenda 2003,
Intl. Wireless World, PC Expo, and the 2002 Organick Lecture in
Computer Science at Univ Utah.
David is also the author of
Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion,
Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber, and
The Aesthetics of Computing,
coauthored
Programming Linguistics,
and coedited
Advances in Languages and Compilers for Parallel
Processing and
Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing: Fourth International
Workshop, Santa Clara, California, Usa, August 7–9M 1991,
Proceedings.
David earned his B.A. at Yale University in 1976 and his Ph.D. at
The State University of New York at
Stony Brook in 1982. His research interests include information
management, parallel
programming, software ensembles and artificial
intelligence.
Read
Computer Visions: A Conversation with David Gelernter.