David Gelernter is the author of eight books and a professor of computer science at Yale University. His 1991 work, Mirror Worlds, not only "foresaw" (Reuters) the World Wide Web but is considered "one of the most influential books in computer science" (Technology Review). Gelernter's research has proved important to several leading Web-search efforts and has also been instrumental in the development of the Java programming language and the first modern social networks, as well as predicting the rise of blogs and activity streams such as Facebook and Twitter.