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David Hillel Gelernter (b. 1955) is a professor of computer science at Yale University. In the 1980s, he made seminal contributions to the field of parallel computation, specifically the tuple space coordination model, as embodied by the Linda programming system. Bill Joy attributesLinda as the inspiration for many elements of JavaSpaces and Jini. He received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in classical Hebrew literature from Yale University in 1976 and his Ph.D. from S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook in 1982. In 1993, he was critically injured opening a mailbomb sent by Theodore Kaczynski, who at that time was an unidentified but violent opponent of technology, dubbed by the press as "the Unabomber". He recovered from his injuries but sustained permanent damage to his right hand and eye. He chronicled the ordeal in his 1997 book Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber (1997). He was one of the founders of the company Mirror Worlds Technologies, which created software using ideas from his book, Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean (1992). Gelernter believed that the computer can free its users from being filing clerks by organizing user's data for them. However, there was little commercial success for Mirror Worlds, and the company disbanded in late 2003. In 2003, he was nominated to the National Council on the Arts and became a member that year. In 2006, Gelernter joined the scientific advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation. Gelernter is a contributor to magazines such as City Journal , The Weekly Standard , and Commentary which are generally considered conservative. He was also a weekly op-ed columnist for the LA Times for seven months.
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