John Graham-Cumming
John Graham-Cumming in 2010
Alma materUniversity of Oxford (DPhil)
Known forPOPFile
The Geek Atlas[3]
Scientific career
InstitutionsCloudflare[1]
Electric Cloud[2]
ThesisThe formal development of secure systems (1992)
Doctoral advisorJeff W. Sanders
Websitewww.jgc.org

John Graham-Cumming is a British software engineer and writer[4] best known for starting a successful petition to the Government of the United Kingdom asking for an apology for its persecution of Alan Turing.[5] UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued the apology in September 2009.[6]As of 2020, Graham-Cumming serves as Chief Technology Officer at Cloudflare;[7][8][9] previously he co-founded Electric Cloud.[2]

Education

Graham-Cumming was educated at the University of Oxford obtaining a BA in Mathematics and Computation and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Computer Science in 1992 for research on formal methods for secure computing systems supervised by Jeff W. Sanders.[10] He was an undergraduate and graduate student at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.[10]

Career

Graham-Cumming is the original writer of POPFile, an open-source, cross-platform, machine learning email spam filtering program.[11] He is the author of The Geek Atlas, a travel book,[3] and The GNU Make book, a how-to technical manual for the GNU make software.[12] He also wrote and maintained a library of functions for GNU Make called the GNU Make Standard Library.[13]

In October 2010, he started an organization whose aim is to build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine,[14][15][16][17] known as Plan 28.[18] He has also campaigned for open-source software in science.[19] In 2014, he launched the MovieCode site on Tumblr, which aims to connect film screenshots to specific extracts of source code.[20] Some of the films and source code covered on the MovieCode website are explored in depth in the form of videos on his site Behind The Screens.

References

  1. ^ Swan, Chris (2014). "John Graham-Cumming on Polyglot Programming and Geek History". infoq.com. C4Media Inc. Retrieved 17 May 2016.
  2. ^ a b Melski, Eric (2009). "Seven lessons from seven years at Electric Cloud". electric-cloud.com. Archived from the original on 25 February 2020.
  3. ^ a b John Graham-Cumming (2009). The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, Inc. ISBN 978-0-596-52320-6. OCLC 850983602.
  4. ^ Anon (2010). "John Graham-Cumming Profile". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  5. ^ Whiteman, Hilary (2009). "Petition seeks apology for Enigma code-breaker Turing". edition.cnn.com. CNN. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  6. ^ "PM's apology to codebreaker Alan Turing: we were inhumane", The Guardian, 10 September 2009
  7. ^ Graham-Cumming, John (2019). "Helping To Build Cloudflare, Part 1: How I came to work here". blog.cloudflare.com. Cloudflare.
  8. ^ Scammell, Robert (2020). "CTO Talk: Q&A with Cloudflare's John Graham-Cumming". verdict.co.uk.
  9. ^ Graham-Cumming, John (2019). "Helping To Build Cloudflare, Part 2: The Most Difficult Two Weeks". blog.cloudflare.com. Cloudflare.
  10. ^ a b Graham-Cumming, John (1992). The formal development of secure systems. ox.ac.uk (DPhi thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC 60063995. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.315747.
  11. ^ Schechter, Bruce (8 March 2003). "Spambusters". newscientist.com. New Scientist. Retrieved 3 November 2013.
  12. ^ Graham-Cumming, John (2008). The GNU Make Book. No Starch Press. ISBN 9781593276492. OCLC 896860365.
  13. ^ "GNU Make Standard Library". gmsl.jgc.org. Retrieved 10 June 2023.
  14. ^ Fildes, Jonathan (2010). "Campaign builds to construct Babbage Analytical Engine". bbc.co.uk. BBC News. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  15. ^ Graham, Duncan (3 March 2011). "A £400,000 PC downgrade: Rebooting Babbage's Analytical Engine". wired.co.uk. Wired UK. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  16. ^ "The Greatest Machine That Never Was: John Graham-Cumming at TEDxImperialCollege". youtube.com. YouTube. 26 April 2012. Archived from the original on 21 December 2021. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  17. ^ "John Graham-Cumming: The greatest machine that never was". ted.com. TED. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  18. ^ "Plan 28: Building Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine". plan28.org. Retrieved 24 July 2012.
  19. ^ Ince, Darrel C.; Hatton, Leslie; Graham-Cumming, John (2012). "The case for open computer programs". Nature. 482 (7386): 485–488. doi:10.1038/nature10836. PMID 22358837.
  20. ^ Johnson, Phil (2014). "The sources of all that code you see in TV and movies". itworld.com. ITworld. Archived from the original on 11 January 2014. Retrieved 13 January 2014.
Categories