Treasure Hunt: 

David Gelernter

 

David Gelernter, Professor of Computer Science at Yale University, endured major injuries to his abdomen, chest, face and hands in the June 1993 bombing by Ted Kaczynski.  In a letter written to Gelernter, Kacazynski charged him, and the rest of the “techno-nerds,” for changing the world for the worse.  Kaczynski expressed his bitter resentment for Gelernter because of technological accomplishments in computer science (1).  The bomb was sent to destroy the life of David Gelernter, but in actuality, Gelernter said he believes it only made him stronger.  Gelernter wrote of his experience as a victim in, Drawing Life:  Surviving the Unabomber.  The book is described as “gripping and poignant narrative as well as a thought-provoking analysis of our culture and where it's headed, Drawing Life is about the resurrection of an extremely thoughtful human being and the extraordinary power of one man's will to live” (2).

In the field of computer science, Gelernter is most known for his programming language “Linda,” co-developed with Nicholas Carriero, that enables computers to link together to work on a single problem.  The coordination language sees widespread use for parallel, or distributed, programming.  Gelernter is currently working on adaptive parallelism, programming environments for parallelism, realtime data fusion, expert databases and information-management systems (3).  Gelernter is co-author of two textbooks about computer programming languages and on parallel programming, as well as the author of Mirror Worlds (Oxford:  1991), The Muse in the Machine (Free Press: 1994) and a new series about computing Masterclasses (4).

Bill Joy said that Gelernter “is one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time.”  Gelernter predicted the rise of the World Wide Web. When the web began to take off, Gelernter’s research team at Yale was thought of as the world's leaders in network software.  The technological advances made by Gelernter were the stepping stone to Internet prodigies, such as Napster’s Sean Fanning who made it possible to share music files over the internet. 

THREE WEB SITES:

1.        Title:  Text of Letter from Unabomber Ted Kacazynski to David Gelernter

           Website:  http://pages.prodigy.com/gvmm68e/letter1.html

           Brief Description:  Letter to David Gelernter

           Source of Website:  Prodigy

2.        Title:  David Gelernter’s Drawing a Life:  Surviving the Unabomber

           Website:  http://www.addall.com/Browse/Detail/0684839121.html

           Brief Description:  Book Review of Gelernter’s book

           Source of Website:  AddAll

3.        Title:  David Gelernter

           Website:  http://www.ycis.yale.edu/people/gelernter.html

           Brief Description:  Brief biography about David Gelernter

           Source of Website:  Yale University

4.        Title:  David Gelernter; Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies, Professor of Computer Science at Yale University
           Website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~earthware/Gelernter.html

           Brief Description:  Biography about Gelernter

           Source of Website:  Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science

5.        Title:  Linda Group

           Website: http://www.cs.yale.edu/Linda/linda.html

  Brief Description:  Gives information concerning “Linda,” parallel and distributed computing, adaptive computation, parallel   programming languages,   groupware and information systems.

           Source of Website:  Yale University