David John Wheeler FRS (9 February 1927 – 13 December 2004) was a computer scientist and professor of computer science at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

Education

Wheeler was born in

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands (county), West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1. ...

, England, the second of the three children of (Agnes) Marjorie, ''née'' Gudgeon, and Arthur Wheeler, a press tool maker, engineer, and proprietor of a small shopfitting firm. He was educated at a local primary school in Birmingham and then went on to King Edward VI Camp Hill School after winning a scholarship in 1938. His education was disrupted by

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

, and he completed his sixth form studies at Hanley High School. In 1945 he gained a scholarship to study the

Cambridge Mathematical Tripos The Mathematical Tripos is the mathematics course that is taught in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. It is the oldest Tripos examined at the University. Origin In its classical nineteenth-century form, the tripos was ...

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...

, graduating in 1948. He was awarded the world's first PhD in computer science in 1951.

Career

Wheeler's contributions to the field included work on the

Electronic delay storage automatic calculator The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer. Inspired by John von Neumann's seminal '' First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC'', the machine was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the Univers ...

(EDSAC) in the 1950s and the

Burrows–Wheeler transform The Burrows–Wheeler transform (BWT, also called block-sorting compression) rearranges a character string into runs of similar characters. This is useful for compression, since it tends to be easy to compress a string that has runs of repeated c ...

(published 1994). Along with Maurice Wilkes and Stanley Gill, he is credited with the invention around 1951 of the subroutine (which they referred to as the ''closed subroutine''), and gave the first explanation of how to design software libraries; as a result, the ''jump to subroutine'' instruction was often called a

Wheeler Jump The Wheeler Jump is a type of subroutine call methodology that was used on some early computers that lacked hardware support for saving the return address. The concept was developed by David Wheeler while working on the pioneering EDSAC machine i ...

. Wilkes published a paper in 1953 discussing relative addressing to facilitate the use of subroutines. (However,

Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical co ...

had discussed subroutines in a paper of 1945 on design proposals for the NPL

ACE An ace is a playing card, die or domino with a single pip. In the standard French deck, an ace has a single suit symbol (a heart, diamond, spade, or club) located in the middle of the card, sometimes large and decorated, especially in the c ...

, going so far as to invent the concept of a return address stack.) He was responsible for the implementation of the

CAP computer The Cambridge CAP computer was the first successful experimental computer that demonstrated the use of security capabilities, both in hardware and software.Levy, p.96 It was developed at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in the 19 ...

, the first to be based on security capabilities. In

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...

, he was the designer of WAKE and the co-designer of the

TEA Tea is an aromatic beverage prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over cured or fresh leaves of ''Camellia sinensis'', an evergreen shrub native to East Asia which probably originated in the borderlands of southwestern China and north ...

and XTEA encryption algorithms together with

Roger Needham Roger Michael Needham (9 February 1935 – 1 March 2003) was a British computer scientist. Early life and education Needham was born in Birmingham, England, the only child of Phyllis Mary, ''née'' Baker (''c''.1904–1976) and Leonard Wi ...

. In 1950, with Maurice Wilkes, he used EDSAC to solve a

differential equation In mathematics, a differential equation is an equation that relates one or more unknown functions and their derivatives. In applications, the functions generally represent physical quantities, the derivatives represent their rates of change, an ...

relating to

gene frequencies Allele frequency, or gene frequency, is the relative frequency of an allele (variant of a gene) at a particular locus in a population, expressed as a fraction or percentage. Specifically, it is the fraction of all chromosomes in the population that ...

in a paper by

Ronald Fisher Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who ...

. This represents the first use of a computer for a problem in the field of

biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

. He became a

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of Darwin College, Cambridge in 1964 and formally retired in 1994, although he continued to be an active member of the

University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory The Department of Computer Science and Technology, formerly the Computer Laboratory, is the computer science department of the University of Cambridge. it employed 35 academic staff, 25 support staff, 35 affiliated research staff, and about 15 ...

until his death.

Personal life

On 24 August 1957 Wheeler married astrophysics research student Joyce Margaret Blackler, who had used EDSAC for her own mathematical investigations as a research student from 1955. Together they had two daughters and a son. Wheeler died of a

heart attack A myocardial infarction (MI), commonly known as a heart attack, occurs when blood flow decreases or stops to the coronary artery of the heart, causing damage to the heart muscle. The most common symptom is chest pain or discomfort which ma ...

on 13 December 2004 while cycling home from the Computer Laboratory.

Recognition and legacy

Wheeler: * In 1981 was elected a fellow of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

* In 1985 received a

Computer Pioneer Award The Computer Pioneer Award was established in 1981 by the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society to recognize and honor the vision of those people whose efforts resulted in the creation and continued vitality of the computer industry. ...

for his contributions to assembly language programming * In 1994 was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery * In 2003 was named a Computer History Museum Fellow Award recipient "for his invention of the closed subroutine, and for his architectural contributions to ILLIAC, the Cambridge Ring, and computer testing" The Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge annually holds the "Wheeler Lecture", a series of distinguished lectures named after him.

Quotes

Wheeler is often quoted as saying "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of

indirection In computer programming, indirection (also called dereferencing) is the ability to reference something using a name, reference, or container instead of the value itself. The most common form of indirection is the act of manipulating a value throug ...

." or "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection, except for the problem of too many layers of indirection." This has been called the

fundamental theorem of software engineering The fundamental theorem of software engineering (FTSE) is a term originated by Andrew Koenig to describe a remark by Butler Lampson attributed to David J. Wheeler: The theorem does not describe an actual theorem that can be proven; rather, it i ...

. Another quotation attributed to him is " Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes."

References

External links

Oral history interview with David Wheeler, 14 May 1987

Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...

, University of Minnesota. Wheeler discusses projects that were run on EDSAC, user-oriented programming methods, and the influence of EDSAC on the

ILLIAC ILLIAC (Illinois Automatic Computer) was a series of supercomputers built at a variety of locations, some at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In all, five computers were built in this series between 1951 and 1974. Some more modern ...

, the

ORDVAC The ORDVAC (''Ordnance Discrete Variable Automatic Computer)'', is an early computer built by the University of Illinois for the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground. A successor to the ENIAC (along with EDVAC built earlier). ...

, and the IBM 701. He also notes visits by

Douglas Hartree Douglas Rayner Hartree (27 March 1897 – 12 February 1958) was an English mathematician and physicist most famous for the development of numerical analysis and its application to the Hartree–Fock equations of atomic physics and the ...

, Nelson Blackman (of ONR),

Peter Naur Peter Naur (25 October 1928 – 3 January 2016) was a Danish computer science pioneer and Turing award winner. He is best remembered as a contributor, with John Backus, to the Backus–Naur form (BNF) notation used in describing the syntax for m ...

, Aad van Wijngarden, Arthur van der Poel, Friedrich Bauer, and

Louis Couffignal Louis Pierre Couffignal (16 March 1902 – 4 July 1966) was a French mathematician and cybernetics pioneer, born in Monflanquin. He taught in schools in the southwest of Brittany, then at the naval academy and, eventually, at the Buffon School. ...

.
Oral history interview with Gene H. Golub

, University of Minnesota. Golub discusses the construction of the

computer, the work of Ralph Meager and David Wheeler on the ILLIAC design, British computer science, programming, and the early users of the ILLIAC at the University of Illinois. * {{DEFAULTSORT:Wheeler, David 1927 births 2004 deaths Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge British computer scientists British information theorists Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the British Computer Society Fellows of Darwin College, Cambridge Fellows of the Royal Society History of computing in the United Kingdom Members of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Modern cryptographers People educated at Hanley High School People from Birmingham, West Midlands