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

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

Education

Wheeler was born in

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the We ...

, 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 opposin ...

, 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 a ...

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 (EDSAC) in the 1950s and the Burrows–Wheeler transform (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. Wilkes published a paper in 1953 discussing relative

addressing In computing, an address space defines a range of discrete addresses, each of which may correspond to a network host, peripheral device, disk sector, a computer data storage, memory cell or other logical or physical entity. For software programs t ...

to facilitate the use of subroutines. (However, Turing had discussed subroutines in a paper of 1945 on design proposals for the NPL ACE, going so far as to invent the concept of a return address stack.) He was responsible for the implementation of the CAP computer, 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 adve ...

, he was the designer of

WAKE Wake or The Wake may refer to: Culture *Wake (ceremony), a ritual which takes place during some funeral ceremonies *Wakes week, an English holiday tradition * Parish Wake, another name of the Welsh ', the fairs held on the local parish's patron s ...

and the co-designer of the TEA and XTEA encryption algorithms together with Roger Needham. In 1950, with Maurice Wilkes, he used EDSAC to solve a differential equation 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 hereditar ...

. 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 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 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, r ...

* In 1985 received a Computer Pioneer Award for his contributions to assembly language programming * In 1994 was inducted as a Fellow of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

* In 2003 was named a

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact ...

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. Another quotation attributed to him is "

Compatibility Compatibility may refer to: Computing * Backward compatibility, in which newer devices can understand data generated by older devices * Compatibility card, an expansion card for hardware emulation of another device * Compatibility layer, compon ...

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, the ORDVAC, and the IBM 701. He also notes visits by Douglas Hartree, Nelson Blackman (of ONR), Peter Naur, Aad van Wijngarden, Arthur van der Poel, Friedrich Bauer, and Louis Couffignal.
Oral history interview with Gene H. Golub

, University of Minnesota. Golub discusses the construction of the ILLIAC 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