[2] His father Herbert Gelernter was a physicist who, in the late 1950s and 1960s, became a pioneer in artificial intelligence and taught computer science at State University of New York at Stony Brook.

[2] In the 1980s, Gelernter made seminal contributions to the field of parallel computation, specifically the tuple space coordination model, as embodied by the Linda programming system he and Nicholas Carriero designed (which he named for Linda Lovelace, the lead actress in the porn movie Deep Throat, mocking the naming of the programming language Ada in tribute to the scientist and first attributed computer programmer, Ada Lovelace).

[14] In 2013, Mirror Worlds Technologies, LLC, a related company that had purchased its patents, filed a complaint of patent infringement against Apple, Best Buy, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Lenovo (United States), Lenovo Group, Microsoft, Samsung Electronic, and Samsung TeleCommunications in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

[15] In July 2019, Gelernter, along with three other co-founders, started Revolution Populi: A blockchain-powered crypto clearing house and social network.

A conservative among mostly liberal Ivy League professors, a religious believer among the often disbelieving ranks of computer scientists..."[22] Endorsing Donald Trump for president, in October 2016, Gelernter wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal calling Hillary Clinton "as phony as a three-dollar bill", and saying that Barack Obama "has governed like a third-rate tyrant".

[26] In October 2020 he joined in signing a letter stating: "Given his astonishing success in his first term, we believe that Donald Trump is the candidate most likely to foster the promise and prosperity of America.

[28] The Washington Post, profiling him in early 2017 as a potential science advisor to Donald Trump, called Gelernter "a vehement critic of modern academia" who has "condemned 'belligerent leftists' and blamed intellectualism for the disintegration of patriotism and traditional family values.

"[29] Shortly thereafter, The Atlantic published a rebuttal of The Washington Post profile, saying it was "hard to imagine a more misleading treatment" of the "pioneering polymath" Gelernter.

[30] Gelernter has "expressed skepticism about the reality" of anthropogenic climate change,"[31][32] rejecting the overwhelming scientific consensus in the field.

"[35] In "A Response to David Gelernter's Attack on Evolution", Patheos, August 26, 2019, Bob Seidensticker writes: "Let's subtitle this story, 'Guy who made his career in not-biology is convinced by other not-biologists that Biology's core theory is wrong.

Scottish columnist Stephen Daisley wrote in Commentary magazine that Gelernter portrayed Obama's presidency as a symbol of the failure of American education and the success of its replacement with a liberal indoctrination system.

As a solution, Gelernter proposed moving all of human knowledge to online servers so that the in-person college experience can be replaced by user-driven self-education.

Daisley wrote, "America-Lite is lean, incisive, convincing, delightfully indelicate, and, in a break from the conventions of the literature on education, honest.

"[43] Gelernter has contributed to magazines such as City Journal, The Weekly Standard, and Commentary that are generally considered neoconservative.

[44] He has published in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.