David R. Wallace

David R. Wallace (December 15, 1942 – March 2, 2012) was an American mathematician and inventor. He is known for the Wallace algorithm as well as “Software Cloaking”, a patented method for hiding the internal operations of computer programs.

Education and professional career

Wallace received degrees in mathematics from Columbia University (BA), University of California at Berkeley (MA) and a Ph.D in 1975 at Tulane University with his dissertation Permutation Groupoids and Circuit Bases: An Algebraic Resolution of Some Graph Structures.^[1]

He was a professor at Emory University, DePauw and Boston University.^{[citation needed]} He was Chief Software Architect for Alliant, Chief compiler architect at Sun Microsystems, and co-founder of Determina (now part of VMware).

Inventions

Wallace was the inventor of the Wallace algorithm, a method for determining the dependence between array references in scientific programs for the purpose of parallelization.^[2]

He was also the inventor of “Software Cloaking”, a technology for preventing reverse engineering. This process is primarily used to prevent hackers from cracking DRM systems. Cloaking hides the internal operation of a program using mathematical transformations. His patent for this technology, “System and Method for Cloaking Software,” was granted by the USPTO in February 2001.^[3]

David R. Wallace had several patents pending for a new form of software security called "Greencastle Vulnerability Shield".

References

^ Permutation Groupoids and Circuit Bases: An Algebraic Resolution of Some Graph Structures, 1975. Advised by Karl Hofmann.
^ *Wallace, David, "Dependence of Multi-Dimensional Array References," Proceedings of the International Conference on Supercomputing, July 1988, pp. 418–428.
^ US Patent 6,192,475, USPTO, USA, 2001.

U.S. patent 6,192,475
David R. Wallace at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
"David Wallace - Obituary". San Francisco Chronicle. March 4, 2012.
"Obituaries". Columbia College Today. No. Winter 2012.

[1] Permutation Groupoids and Circuit Bases: An Algebraic Resolution of Some Graph Structures, 1975. Advised by Karl Hofmann.

[2] *Wallace, David, "Dependence of Multi-Dimensional Array References," Proceedings of the International Conference on Supercomputing, July 1988, pp. 418–428.

[3] US Patent 6,192,475, USPTO, USA, 2001.

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