CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
Menu
Research dossier · People & Ideas

David Luckham

American computer scientist

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 31, 2026
Entity authorityQ5236809
Source-derived summary

David Luckham is an emeritus professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he was one of the implementers of the first systems for the programming language Lisp.

He is best known as the originator of complex event processing (CEP) as proposed in his 2002 book The Power of Events. CEP consists of a set of concepts and techniques for processing real-time events and extracting information from event streams as they arrive. CEP has since become an enabling technology in many systems that are used to take immediate action in response to incoming streams of events. Applications are described in this book that may now be found in many sectors of business including stock market trading systems, mobile devices, internet operations, fraud detection, the transport industry, and government intelligence gathering. The book also describes advanced event processing techniques such as event abstraction and event hierarchies that are not yet in general practice. Luckham's latest book is Event Processing for Business: Organizing the Real-Time Enterprise.

Luckham has held faculty and invited faculty positions in both mathematics and computer science at eight major universities in Europe and the United States. He was a cofounder of Rational Software, Inc., in 1981.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “David Luckham” as american computer scientist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around David, Luckham and American.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2002, 1981—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1934-09-07. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with David, Luckham and American providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “David Luckham”, the useful work is to connect “american computer scientist” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5236809. VIAF identifies the subject as 44924748. The Library of Congress control number is n86121786. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2002 and 1981.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “David Luckham”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow David Luckham primary sources, David Luckham archive and David research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “David Luckham”?
  2. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from David Luckham” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.