John Graham-Cumming | |
---|---|
![]() John Graham-Cumming in 2010 | |
Alma mater | University of Oxford (DPhil) |
Known for | POPFile The Geek Atlas [1] |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Cloudflare (Board of Directors) [2] Cloudflare (Former CTO) [3] Electric Cloud [4] |
Thesis | The formal development of secure systems (1992) |
Doctoral advisor | Jeff W. Sanders |
Website | www |
John Graham-Cumming is a British software engineer and writer [5] best known for starting a successful petition to the Government of the United Kingdom asking for an apology for its persecution of Alan Turing. [6] UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued the apology in September 2009. [7] As of 2025 [update] , Graham-Cumming is a member of the Board of Directors at Cloudflare, [8] [9] where he previously served as the company's Chief Technology Officer until March 2025. [10] [11] [12] Prior to joining Cloudflare, he co-founded Electric Cloud. [4]
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. [13] He was an undergraduate and graduate student at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. [13]
Graham-Cumming is the original writer of POPFile, an open-source, cross-platform, machine learning email spam filtering program. [14] He is the author of The Geek Atlas, a travel book, [1] and The GNU Make book, a how-to technical manual for the GNU make software. [15] He also wrote and maintained a library of functions for GNU Make called the GNU Make Standard Library. [16]
In October 2010, he started an organization whose aim is to build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, [17] [18] [19] [20] known as Plan 28. [21] He has also campaigned for open-source software in science. [22] In 2014, he launched the MovieCode site on Tumblr, which aims to connect film screenshots to specific extracts of source code. [23] 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.