David Musser

David "Dave" Musser is a professor emeritus of computer science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, United States.

He is known for his work in generic programming, particularly as applied to C++, and his collaboration with Alexander Stepanov. Their work together includes coining the term "generic programming" in , and led to the creation of the C++ Standard Template Library (STL).

In , he developed the sorting algorithm called introsort (also known as introspective sort), and the related selection algorithm called introselect, to provide algorithms that are both efficient and have optimal worst-case performance, for use in the STL.

Early life and career He has a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Early in his career, he was on the computer science faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. He was also involved in DARPA-sponsored research at the Information Sciences Institute in California. In 1979, he started eight years at GE's Labs in Niskayuna, New York on the research staff. In 1988, he joined the computer science department at Rensselaer full time. He was tenured in 1995. The paper was also presented in 2013 at the Agere! 13, Splash Conference in Indianapolis.

In 2017, MIT Press published the book Fundamental Proof Methods in Computer Science by Musser and Konstantine Arkoudas.

Selected publications