David Gelernter

David GelernterCourtesy Yale University

David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale, a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard and Chief Design Officer, Lifestreams Inc. He has worked on artificial intelligence, interfaces and information management. His book, Mirror Worlds (1991) "foresaw" the World Wide Web (Reuters, 3/20/01, and others). It's been called  “one of the most influential books in computer science” (Technology Review, July 2007). Mirror Worlds and Gelernter’s earlier work on tuple spaces directly influenced the development by Sun Microsystems of Java and other systems.  His work on the “Lifestreams” system in the 1990s anticipated today’s stream-based tools at the major social-networking sites and much other ongoing work.  Among his other books are the novel 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (“Original and arresting”: Washington Post Book World), the memoir Drawing Life (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year) and Judaism, A Way of Being (“Shocks with the lyricism of his prose": Boston Globe).