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Concept
David Wheeler (computer scientist)
Summary
David John Wheeler FRS (9 February 1927 – 13 December 2004) was a computer scientist and professor of computer science at the University of Cambridge.
Wheeler was born in Birmingham, 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, and he completed his sixth form studies at Hanley High School. In 1945 he gained a scholarship to study the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1948. He was awarded the world's first PhD in computer science in 1951.
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 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, he was the designer of WAKE 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 in a paper by Ronald Fisher. This represents the first use of a computer for a problem in the field of biology.
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