David Gelernter’s work with Nick Carriero in the 1980s showed how to build the software basis for the flexible, expandable, superfast web search engine, and anticipated the cloud. “Mirror Worlds,” published in 1991, has been regarded as “one of the most influential books in computer science” (Technology Review, July 2007), as it ”foresaw” the World Wide Web (Reuters, March 20, 2001, and others).
“Mirror Worlds” and David’s earlier work directly influenced Sun Microsystems’ development of the Internet programming language Java. His work with Eric Freeman on the Lifestreams system in the 1990s led to the first blog on the Internet (which ran on Lifestreams at Yale) and anticipated today’s stream-based tools at the major social-networking sites and many other ongoing works. His new book “Res Cogitans (The Dark Side of the Mind)” will be published by Norton next year. David is a professor of computer science at Yale and chief scientist at Lifestreams Inc.
His paintings are in the permanent collections of the Tikvah Foundation and the Yeshiva University Museum, where he had a one-man show last fall.
