David Gelernter

David Gelernter received his BA at Yale University (1976) and his PhD in Computer Science from SUNY Stony Brook (1982). Gelernter’s work with Nick Carriero in the 1980s showed how to build software frameworks for expandable, superfast web search engines. His book Mirror Worlds (Oxford University Press, 1991) foresaw the World Wide Web (Reuters, March 20, 2001, and others), and according to Technology Review (July 2007) was “one of the most influential books in computer science.” Mirror Worlds and Gelernter’s earlier work directly influenced the development by Sun Microsystems 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 (chat streams, activity streams, Twitter streams, feeds of all sorts) and much other ongoing work. Gelernter’s paintings are in the permanent collections of the Tikvah Foundation and the Yeshiva University Museum, where he had a one-man show last fall, as well as in private collections.