David Wheeler (computer scientist)
David John Wheeler ( born February 9, 1927 in Birmingham, England; † 13 December 2004) was a British computer pioneer.
Considered together with Maurice Wilkes and Stanley Gill as a developer of the first subroutine (then also called Wheeler -jump ). He became known for work in the field of data compression and cryptography. He developed with Michael Burrows, the Burrows-Wheeler transform is an algorithm of the bzip2 compression algorithm using inter alia. With Roger Needham, he developed the Tiny Encryption Algorithm, a widely used block cipher. He also served as the doctoral advisor of Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C .
Wheeler received in 1945 a scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge 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 the EDSAC in 1949 he was awarded the Fellow status of 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 was also a visiting professor at the Universities of Illinois, Sydney and California and consultants, for example, the Bell Laboratories and the Western Research Laboratory of DEC.
He died at the age of 77 of heart failure.
His most famous quote is "Any trouble in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection. But did want to create Usually another problem " ( German: " Any computer problem can be solved at a higher level of abstraction, but which is normally pose a new problem ". . ). However, only the first sentence is usually quoted and the quote so distorted.