Education
He studied pure mathematics at graduate level at the University of Toronto (Canada) in the early 1980s.
He studied pure mathematics at graduate level at the University of Toronto (Canada) in the early 1980s.
He then worked at Stanford University (California, United States of America). He worked extensively with APL, first at I. P. Sharp Associates alongside Ken Iverson and Roger Hui, and later at Morgan Stanley developing financial applications. At Morgan Stanley, Whitney helped to develop A+ to facilitate the migration of APL applications from International Business Machines Corporation mainframes to a network of Sun workstations.
A+ had a smaller set of primitive functions and was designed for speed and to handle large sets of time series data.
In 1993, Whitney left Morgan Stanley and developed the first version of the K language. At the same time he co-founded Kx Systems to commercialize the product.
He also wrote the initial prototype of J, a terse and macro-heavy single page of code, in one afternoon, which then served as the model for J implementor Roger Hui, and was responsible for suggesting the rank operators in J.
Currently he is the Chairman of the Board of Kx Systems.