David Wheeler

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David Wheeler (bottom row, second from right) and the other members of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in 1949

David John Wheeler (born February 9, 1927 in Birmingham , England - † December 13, 2004 ) was a British computer pioneer .

Life

Together with Maurice Wilkes and Stanley Gill, he is considered to be the developer of the first subroutine (also called wheeler-jump at the time). He became known for his work in the field of data compression and cryptography . Together with Michael Burrows, he developed the Burrows-Wheeler transformation , an algorithm that is used in the bzip2 compression algorithm . With Roger Needham he developed the Tiny Encryption Algorithm , a widely used block cipher . Among other things, he was the doctoral supervisor of Bjarne Stroustrup , the developer of C ++ .

Wheeler received a scholarship from Trinity College , Cambridge in 1945 and studied mathematics and received his university degree in 1948, in 1951 he received his doctorate ( Automatic computing with the EDSAC ). Wheeler worked on the first memory-controlled computer EDSAC  1. For his development of the assembler (as a hardware unit) for EDSAC in 1949, he received Fellow status from Trinity College.

As a post-graduate student , he was at the University of Illinois , where he worked on the design of ORDVAC and ILLIAC -1.

Before his retirement, Wheeler was a professor of computer science at the University of Cambridge . He has also been visiting professor at the Universities of Illinois, Sydney and California, and advisor to, for example, Bell Laboratories and DEC's Western Research Laboratory .

He died of heart failure at the age of 77 .

His best-known quote is “ Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection. But that usually will create another problem. "(German:" Every computer problem can be solved on a higher level of abstraction. But that will usually raise a new problem. ") However, mostly only the first sentence is quoted and the quotation is thus falsified.

Awards

Web links

Commons : David Wheeler  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Wheeler, David
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wheeler, David John (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British computer pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH February 9, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Birmingham , England
DATE OF DEATH December 13, 2004