'''Joseph D. Becker''' is one of the co-founders of the [[Unicode]] project, and anTechnical OfficerVice President Emeritus of the [[Unicode Consortium]]. He has worked on artificial intelligence at [[BBN Technologies|BBN]] and multilingual workstation software at [[Xerox]].
Becker has long been involved in the issues of multilingual computing in general and Unicode in particular. His 1984 paper in ''[[Scientific American]]'', "[https://www.jstor.org/stable/24969416 Multilingual Word Processing]", was a seminal work on somethis of the problems involved, including the need to distinguish [[Character (computing)|characters]] and [[glyph]]stechnology.<ref>{{cite book|title=Using Computers in Linguistics: A Practical Guide|editor1=Helen Aristar Dry|editor2=John Lawler|isbn=978-0415167932|chapter=The Nature of Linguistic Data and the Requirements of a Computing Environment for Linguistic Research|chapter-url=http://www.sil.org/computing/routledge/simons/multilingual.html|author=Gary F. Simons}}</ref> In 1987, Becker (then at Xerox), together with [[Lee Collins (Unicode)|Lee Collins]] (also at Xerox) and [[Mark Davis (Unicode)|Mark Davis]] of [[Apple Inc.|Apple]] began investigations into the practicality of creating a universal character set.<ref name="Gardner2009">{{cite book|author=Scott Gardner|title=The Definitive Guide to Pylons|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TkEnCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA218|date=25 January 2009|publisher=Apress|isbn=978-1-4302-0534-0|page=218 |quote=The origins of Unicode date back to 1987 when Joe Becker, Lee Collins, and Mark Davis started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set.}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.unicode.org/history/summary.html|title=Summary|work=History of Unicode}}</ref> It was Becker who coined the word "Unicode" to cover the project.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://unicode.org/history/earlyyears.html|title=Early Years of Unicode|work=History of Unicode}}</ref> His article ''[[Unicode 88]]'',<ref name="Becker_1988_Unicode"/> contained the first public summary of the principles originally underlying the Unicode standard.
Now, the text you are reading - and text on all of Wikipedia and on most of the World Wide Web - is stored in Unicode ... usually in the "UTF-8" Unicode Transformation Format designed by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike <ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8</ref>. You can check it out in the HTML header of this page, or of the Wikipedia home page <ref>https://www.wikipedia.org/</ref>.
Early on, Becker published a small mathematics paper<ref>Becker, J. D.; Ordman, E. T. On functions defined by iterations of each other. Aequationes Math. 8 (1972), 238-241.</ref> with Edward T. Ordman, who later published papers with Paul Erdős<ref>http://ordman.net/Edward/acad.html</ref>. This work, though mostly by Ordman, gives Becker an Erdős number<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdős_number</ref> of 2.
