David Wheeler (computer Scientist)

David Wheeler (computer Scientist)

David John Wheeler FRS (9 February 1927 – 13 December 2004) was a computer scientist. He was born in Birmingham and gained a scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge to read mathematics, graduating in 1948. He completed the world's first PhD in computer science in 1951.

His contributions to the field included work on the EDSAC and the Burrows–Wheeler transform. Along with Maurice Wilkes and Stanley Gill he is credited with the invention of the subroutine (which they referred to as the closed subroutine), because of which jump to subroutine instruction is often called Wheeler Jump. 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.

Wheeler married Joyce Blackler in August 1957, who herself used EDSAC for her own mathematical investigations as a research student from 1955. He became a Fellow 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. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2003 he was a Computer History Museum Fellow Award recipient.

Wheeler is often quoted as saying "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection." Another quotation attributed to him is "Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes."