Peter J. Denning

Peter Denning was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Darien, Connecticut. He was interested in science from an early age and began building electronic circuits as a teenager. His computer built from pinball machine parts won the science fair in 1959, launching him into the new field of computing. At MIT for his doctorate in 1968, he worked on prototypes of computer utilities, precursors of today’s “cloud computing”. He became an educator and taught computer science at Princeton, Purdue, George Mason University, and Naval Postgraduate School. He was a pioneer in operating systems and computer networks and invented the “working set”, a way of automatically managing data flows in memory that is widely used in modern operating systems from desktops to smartphones. A strong advocate of computing as a domain of science on par with the traditional physical, life, and social sciences, he has codified the Great Principles of Computing. In the 1980s, while directing a research lab at NASA Ames Research Center, he became interested in how he could teach his students and researchers to be successful innovators, broadening his attentions to the human practices of technology adoption. He has won over two dozen awards for his work in computing science and education. He is a past president of ACM, the oldest scientific society in computing.