Harlan Bennet Sexton

Who is Harlan Bennet Sexton?

Harlan Sexton is a co-founder of Ayasdi, has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Stanford University, and more than 30 software patents. In 2004, after more than 20 years in applied research and software development, he joined his longtime friend and colleague, Gunnar Carlsson, to work on the DARPA TDA project to apply topology to real world problems. Before this, Harlan spent a decade at Oracle where he was part of the 5-person team that implemented a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) for the Oracle RDMBS. One of the innovations in the Oracle JVM was a production-quality stack-conservative garbage collector that allowed tight integration between Java and the database. Parts of the code he wrote there still run hundreds of millions times per day, as Oracle databases carry out routine financial and retail transactions throughout the world. Earlier in his career, Harlan worked at Lucid, where he took the lead on Lisp performance and interoperability and wrote an incremental C/C++ linker that was later deployed by Sun Microsystems, and at Object Design, where he was an architect and implementer of an object-oriented database for Smalltalk. He also has a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Ohio State, is married with 2 grown children, and when not inventing things, enjoys the game of golf.