David Gelernter

David Gelernter "expressed skepticism about the reality" of anthropogenic climate change. In July 2019, Gelernter challenged Darwin's theories. In a review of Stephen Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt, which he wrote for the Claremont Review of Books, Gelernter does not accept evolution "as Darwin presents it" On the other hand, Gelernter stipulates he "cannot accept" intelligent design either, saying that "as a theory, it would seem to have a long way to go."

The Washington Post, profiling him in early 2017 as a potential science advisor to Donald Trump, called him "a vehement critic of modern academia" who has "condemned 'belligerent leftists' and blamed intellectualism for the disintegration of patriotism and traditional family values." Shortly thereafter, The Atlantic published a rebuttal of the Washington Post profile, saying it was "hard to imagine a more misleading treatment" of the "pioneering polymath" Gelernter.

Time Magazine profiled Gelernter in 2016, describing him as a "stubbornly independent thinker. A conservative among mostly liberal Ivy League professors, a religious believer among the often disbelieving ranks of computer scientists." In October 2016, he wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal endorsing Donald Trump for President, calling Hillary Clinton "as phony as a three-dollar bill," and saying that Barack Obama "has governed like a third-rate tyrant."

Gelernter has critiqued what he perceives as cultural illiteracy among students. In 2015, he commented, "They [students] know nothing about art. They know nothing about history. They know nothing about philosophy. And because they have been raised as not even atheists, they don't rise to the level of atheists, insofar as they've never thought about the existence or nonexistence of God. It has never occurred to them. They know nothing about the Bible."

In America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats), Gelernter argues that American higher education no longer cares about producing well-rounded and cultured students; academics instead believe their role is to dictate how other Americans live and think. Stephen Daisley wrote in Commentary magazine that Gelernter portrays Obama's presidency as a symbol of the failure of American education and the success of its replacement with a liberal indoctrination system. As a solution, Gelernter proposes moving all of human knowledge to online servers so that the in-person college experience can be replaced by user-driven self-education. Daisley wrote, "America-Lite is lean, incisive convincing, delightfully indelicate, and, in a break from the conventions of the literature on education, honest. It is a fine dissection—de-construction, if you must—of the corruption of higher education and the resulting debasement of political culture. If it makes its way on to a single college reading list, Hell will have frozen over."

He helped found the company Mirror Worlds Technologies, which in 2001 released Scopeware software using ideas from his 1992 book Mirror Worlds. Gelernter believed that computers can free users from being filing clerks by organizing their data. The company announced it would "cease operations effective May 15, 2004". On May 23, 2013, a related company Mirror Worlds, LLC filed a complaint of patent infringement against Apple Inc., Best Buy Co. Inc., Dell Inc., Hewlett Packard Co., Lenovo (United States) Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd., Microsoft Corporation, Samsung Electronic USA Inc, Samsung TeleCommunications America, LLC in the Texas Eastern District Court (case no. 6:2013cv00419). In August 2016, the case was dismissed with prejudice. The case has been considered by the Supreme Court of the United States but a petition for writ of certiorari was denied on June 24, 2013.

In 2003, he became a member of the National Council on the Arts.

In 1993 he was sent a mail bomb by Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, which almost killed him and left him with some permanent disabilities: he lost his right hand and his right eye was permanently damaged.

On June 24, 1993, Gelernter was severely injured opening a mail bomb sent by the Unabomber. He recovered from his injuries, but his right hand and eye were permanently damaged. He chronicled the ordeal in his 1997 book Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber.

Gelernter's book Mirror Worlds (1991) "prophesied the rise of the World Wide Web." Bill Joy, founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, says Gelernter is "one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time." The New York Times called him a computer science "rock star".

In the 1980s, he made seminal contributions to the field of parallel computation, specifically the tuple space coordination model, as embodied by the Linda programming system (named for Linda Lovelace, an actress in the porn movie Deep Throat, mocking Ada's tribute to the scientist and first attributed computer programmer, Ada Lovelace). Bill Joy cites Linda as the inspiration for many elements of JavaSpaces and Jini.

David Gelernter's father was computer science professor Herbert Gelernter, who taught at Stony Brook University. He received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in classical Hebrew literature from Yale University in 1976 and his Ph.D. from S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook in 1982.