David Gelernter

BA and MA in Jewish Studies (1976, '77; Yale), PhD in computer science (1983, SUNY-Stony Brook). Professor of computer science at Yale; contributing editor at the Weekly Standard. He was a board member at the National Endowment for the Arts 2003-2006, weekly culture-&-politics columnist at New York Post (1996-7) and Los Angeles Times (2005); he's been a senior fellow in Jewish Studies at the Shalem Center, and a national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; his book on the images that define Judaism (Judaism, A way of being, 2009) appeared in November.

He has worked on artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind, among other things; Mirror Worlds (1991) "foresaw" the World Wide Web (Reuters, 3/20/01, and others); "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, JavaSpaces and Jini. His work on the "Lifstreams" system in the 1990s anticipated today's stream-based tools at the major social-networking sites and much other ongoing work on "lifestreaming" (the name has become generic). A recent taped conversation at Edge.org with John Markoff of the NYT & Clay Shirky of NYU discusses his role in the invention of lifestreaming and "the cloud".

His other books include Americanism (2007), Machine Beauty (1998), The Muse in the Machine (1994) and the novel 1939 (1995), among others; his short stories & a short novella (Swan House) have appeared in Commentary. His articles and short pieces have appeared in many newspapers and magazines; his essays are widely anthologized.