David Gelernter

David Gelernter

Writer, Artist, & Computer Scientist

David Gelernter is professor of computer science at Yale, chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies, contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, and member of the National Council of the Arts. He is the author of several books and many technical articles, as well as 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. According to Reuters, his book "Mirror Worlds" (Oxford University Press, 1991) "foresaw" the World Wide Web 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. Gelernter is also the author of "The Muse in the Machine" (Free Press, 1994), the novel "1939" (Harper Perennial, 1995), "Machine Beauty" (Basic Books, 1998), and most recently, "Judaism: A Way of Being" (Yale University Press, 2010).

4mins
The terrorist attack David Gelernter experienced in 1993 left his body injured, but his mind unfazed.
6mins
The basic user interface of our personal computers has stayed the same for a generation. How can we move beyond the desktop?
5mins
How spreading sensitive information over thousands of computers could revolutionize digital security.
8mins
The “Judaism: A Way of Being” author makes the case for Judaism as the most important intellectual development in Western history.
4mins
Throughout the history of Jewish culture, the image has been inseparable from the word.
40mins
A conversation with the writer, artist, and Yale computer scientist.
2mins
Every year, David Gelernter’s students at Yale “are less and less able to express themselves in writing.” Unless that trend changes, old media may wither.