David John Wheeler FRS (9 February 1927 – 13 December 2004) was an English computer scientist and a professor of computer science at the University of Cambridge.
Education
Wheeler was born in Birmingham, England. He was the second of three children. His parents were Marjorie Gudgeon and Arthur Wheeler. Arthur worked as a press tool maker, engineer, and owner of a small business that installs shop fixtures. He attended a local primary school in Birmingham. In 1938, he won a scholarship to attend King Edward VI Camp Hill School. His education was interrupted by World War II. He finished his advanced high school classes at Hanley High School. In 1945, he received a scholarship to study the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1948. He was awarded the world's first PhD in computer science in 1951.
Career
Wheeler worked on the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) in the 1950s and the Burrows–Wheeler transform, which was published in 1994. He worked with Maurice Wilkes and Stanley Gill to invent the subroutine around 1951, which they called the closed subroutine. He also explained how to create software libraries. Because of this, the instruction to jump to a subroutine was often called a Wheeler Jump. In 1953, Wilkes wrote a paper about relative addressing, which made it easier to use subroutines. However, Alan Turing had previously discussed subroutines in a 1945 paper about the NPL ACE. He also introduced the idea of a return address stack.
Wheeler was responsible for creating the CAP computer, the first to use security capabilities. In cryptography, he designed the WAKE algorithm and helped create the TEA and XTEA encryption algorithms with Roger Needham. In 1950, he and Maurice Wilkes used EDSAC to solve a differential equation from a paper by Ronald Fisher. This was the first time a computer was used to solve a problem in biology.
He became a Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge, in 1964 and officially retired in 1994. However, he remained active at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory until his death.
Personal life
On August 24, 1957, Wheeler married Joyce Margaret Blackler, a student studying astrophysics. Joyce had used EDSAC to do math research as a student from 1955. Together, they had two daughters and one son.
Wheeler died because of a heart attack on December 13, 2004, while riding a bicycle home from the Computer Laboratory.
Recognition and legacy
In 1981, he was chosen as a member of the Royal Society. In 1985, he received a Computer Pioneer Award for his work in assembly language programming. In 1994, he was chosen as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2003, he was named a Fellow by the Computer History Museum for inventing the closed subroutine and for his work on ILLIAC, the Cambridge Ring, and computer testing. The Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge holds the "Wheeler Lecture" every year. This series of special lectures is named after him.
Quotes
Wheeler is often said to have mentioned, "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection," 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 idea has been referred to as the fundamental theorem of software engineering.
Another quote linked to him is, "Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes."