David Gelernter


David Hillel Gelernter is an American computer scientist, artist, and writer. He is currently a professor of computer science at Yale University. He is a former national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and senior fellow in Jewish thought at the Shalem Center, and sat on the National Endowment for the Arts. He publishes widely; his work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Los Angeles Times, The Weekly Standard, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and elsewhere. His paintings have been exhibited in New Haven and Manhattan.
He is known for contributions to parallel computation and for books on topics including computed worlds, and what he sees as the destructive influence of liberal academia on American society, expressed in his book .
In 1993 he was sent a mail bomb by Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, which almost killed him and left him with some permanent disabilities: he lost his right hand and his right eye was permanently damaged.

Life and work

David Gelernter's father was computer science professor Herbert Gelernter, who taught at Stony Brook University.
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 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 cites Linda as the inspiration for many elements of JavaSpaces and Jini.
On June 24, 1993, Gelernter was severely injured opening a mail bomb sent by the Unabomber. He recovered from his injuries, but his right hand and eye were permanently damaged. He chronicled the ordeal in his 1997 book Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber.
He helped found the company Mirror Worlds Technologies, which in 2001 released Scopeware software using ideas from his 1992 book Mirror Worlds. Gelernter believed that computers can free users from being filing clerks by organizing their data. The company announced it would "cease operations effective May 15, 2004". On May 23, 2013, a related company Mirror Worlds, LLC filed a complaint of patent infringement against Apple Inc., Best Buy Co. Inc., Dell Inc., Hewlett Packard Co., Lenovo Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd., Microsoft Corporation, Samsung Electronic USA Inc, Samsung TeleCommunications America, LLC in the Texas Eastern District Court. In August 2016, the case was dismissed with prejudice. The case has been considered by the Supreme Court of the United States but a petition for writ of certiorari was denied on June 24, 2013.
In 2003, he became a member of the National Council on the Arts.
Gelernter has critiqued what he perceives as cultural illiteracy among students. In 2015, he commented, "They know nothing about art. They know nothing about history. They know nothing about philosophy. And because they have been raised as not even atheists, they don't rise to the level of atheists, insofar as they've never thought about the existence or nonexistence of God. It has never occurred to them. They know nothing about the Bible."

Political views

Time Magazine profiled Gelernter in 2016, describing him as a "stubbornly independent thinker. A conservative among mostly liberal Ivy League professors, a religious believer among the often disbelieving ranks of computer scientists." In October 2016, he wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal endorsing Donald Trump for President, calling Hillary Clinton "as phony as a three-dollar bill," and saying that Barack Obama "has governed like a third-rate tyrant."
Gelernter contributes to magazines such as City Journal, The Weekly Standard, and Commentary which are generally considered neoconservative. For seven months, he contributed a weekly op-ed column to the LA Times.

Controversial positions on science

The Washington Post, profiling him in early 2017 as a potential science advisor to Donald Trump, called him "a vehement critic of modern academia" who has "condemned 'belligerent leftists' and blamed intellectualism for the disintegration of patriotism and traditional family values." Shortly thereafter, The Atlantic published a rebuttal of the Washington Post profile, saying it was "hard to imagine a more misleading treatment" of the "pioneering polymath" Gelernter.
David Gelernter "expressed skepticism about the reality" of anthropogenic climate change. In July 2019, Gelernter challenged Darwin's theories. In a review of Stephen Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt, which he wrote for the Claremont Review of Books, Gelernter does not accept evolution "as Darwin presents it" On the other hand, Gelernter stipulates he "cannot accept" intelligent design either, saying that "as a theory, it would seem to have a long way to go."

Book reviews

Gelernter's book Mirror Worlds "prophesied the rise of the World Wide Web." Bill Joy, founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, says Gelernter is "one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time." The New York Times called him a computer science "rock star".
In , Gelernter argues that American higher education no longer cares about producing well-rounded and cultured students; academics instead believe their role is to dictate how other Americans live and think. Stephen Daisley wrote in Commentary magazine that Gelernter portrays Obama's presidency as a symbol of the failure of American education and the success of its replacement with a liberal indoctrination system. As a solution, Gelernter proposes moving all of human knowledge to online servers so that the in-person college experience can be replaced by user-driven self-education. Daisley wrote, "America-Lite is lean, incisive convincing, delightfully indelicate, and, in a break from the conventions of the literature on education, honest. It is a fine dissection—de-construction, if you must—of the corruption of higher education and the resulting debasement of political culture. If it makes its way on to a single college reading list, Hell will have frozen over."
Russell Jacoby was critical in his review of Gelernter's book America-Lite, feeling it contained insufficient arguments. Jacoby claimed that Gelernter blamed Jews for causing the breakdown of patriotism and the traditional family, writing "Gelernter is Jewish, and it is not likely that a non-Jew would airily argue that obnoxious leftist Jews have taken over elite higher education."

Selected works

Books