David Greer (b. 1982), is a controversial British physicist and computer programmer. Educated at Methodist College, Belfast and Cambridge University, he has developed a reputation as a brilliant academic whilst simultaneously becoming a self-styled anti-Establishment figure. Growing up in Ulster during the 1990s he socialised with subversive groups in the province, first showing his appetite for controversy at an early age when he placed an “inappropriate adornment” on a statue of Lord Kelvin. He was implicated in a number of other incidents before being identified as a key figure in a major disruption which reduced Methodist College to anarchy in May 1999. The University of Cambridge is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world (after Oxford). ... The Establishment is a generalized, mostly negative term used in Western societies to refer to the controlling (elite) structures of those societies. ... For other places and things named Ulster, see Ulster (disambiguation). ... William Thomson, Archbishop of York, has the same name as this man. ...

As a self-taught programmer Greer is credited with triggering an underculture in computer game design. He specialised in writing simple implementations of engaging games such as minesweeper (of which he is a world-ranked player) and draughts, then either incorporating them into legitimate office software or alternatively releasing them as macros. His entertaining games spread rapidly among bored office workers but subsequently revealed logic bombs, which harmed the computer systems on which the games were played by progressively deleting files at random. Greer later claimed, however, that he was not the author of the logic bombs, and that they had been added to his freely-distributed code by a malicious hacker. The computer game Minesweeper. ... Draughts, also known as checkers, is a group of board games which involve the jumping of enemy pieces. ... Macro (meaning large or wide) is also applied to macroeconomics, and macroscopic or macro lenses. ... This article is about Logic bombs, a type of malicious software code. ... Hacker is a term used to describe different types of computer experts. ...

Despite these subversive tendencies Greer excelled in physics and mathematics and gained a scholarship to read Natural Sciences at Cambridge University. By all accounts he was a brilliant, if somewhat enigmatic student, graduating top of his year and winning the coveted J. S. Wilson Prize. As an undergraduate at the Cavendish Laboratory he established his reputation as an academic, writing ground-breaking software to model the spread of forest fires and particle decays in nuclear physics. But his rebellious activities nevertheless continued at Cambridge. Almost as soon as he arrived at the university he became known for disruptive and illegal behaviour, planting devices which emitted noxious gases in fellow students' rooms and constructing a device capable of firing metal slugs through walls and doors. In his final year Greer and another student were accused of breaking and entering other students' accommodation as part of an intimidating ritual known as “banjaxing”. The University of Cambridge is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world (after Oxford). ... The Cavendish Laboratory is in the Department of Physics of the University of Cambridge. ...

In 2003 Greer became a visiting scholar at California Institute of Technology, where he continued his programming to model particle decays with Professor David Hitlin as part of the B and B-bar (BaBar) project based at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). He subsequently returned to the UK working as a programmer for several large organisations including the insurance giant Experian, but suffered stormy relationships with many of his employers because he strongly disagreed with their corporate organisation and resistance to change. Although, to date, he has no criminal convictions and claims he is no longer associated with social disruption or the underculture of computing, he remains in the media spotlight. In 2004 pictures were published which allegedly showed Greer and another Cambridge graduate scientifically testing and refining weapons from the legendary Anarchist's Cookbook, and he recently offended less able British students by implying that high school science was so easy as to be worthless. The California Institute of Technology (commonly known as Caltech) is a private, coeducational university located in Pasadena, California, in the United States. ... In the field of particle physics BaBar is an international collaboration at the Stanford Linear Accelerator investigating CP-violation effects using the BaBar particle detector. ... The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) is a U.S. national laboratory operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy. ... Experian Information Solutions, Inc. ...