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I'm not sure that's the thing he's most known for. I know his work mainly from SLOCCount [1] and his clever solution for Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" hack [2].

1. http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/ 2. http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/

To add to this:

He is the co-inventor of "Burrows–Wheeler transform", which is a key component in any modern genomics analysis pipeline, used in bzip2 (the "b" stands for BWT), etc.

The transform was produced by a different David Wheeler, who was a computer scientist at Cambridge and died in 2004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wheeler_%28British_compu...

Apologies for the confusion, and thanks for the correction @jamessb. I mixed the author of the post with David J Wheeler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wheeler_(British_computer..., when the author is clearly David A. Wheeler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Wheeler).

He has also written some good stuff. I had the pleasure of translating "Why OSS/FS..." for my LUG, some time ago: http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html -> http://hispalinux.es/informes/wheeler/index.html