Famous Computer Scientists

Alan Mathison Turing (June 23, 1912 – June 7, 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing greatly influenced theoretical computer science. He provided a formalization of algorithm and computation using the Turing machine, a model for a general-purpose computer. People widely consider Turing the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. His home country did not fully recognize these achievements.

Marissa Ann Mayer (born May 30, 1975) is an American information technology executive and co-founder of Lumi Labs. Mayer served as president and CEO of Yahoo! from July 2012. In January 2017, an announcement stated she would leave the Yahoo! board after Verizon Communications bought Yahoo!'s operating business for $4.8 billion. She did not join the new company, now Verizon Media (formerly Oath), and resigned on June 13, 2017. She graduated from Stanford University and had a long tenure there.

Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur. He co-founded Google with Sergey Brin. Page is the CEO of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company. After stepping down as Google CEO in August 2001 for Eric Schmidt, he took the role back in April 2011. He announced he would step down again in July 2015 to become Alphabet's CEO, reorganizing Google's assets. Under Page, Alphabet seeks major advancements across many industries. As of June 2019, Page is the

Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin (Russian: Серге́й Миха́йлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur. Brin co-founded Google with Larry Page. He is the president of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company. As of June 2019, Brin is the 13th richest person globally, with an estimated net worth of US$50.1 billion. Brin moved to the United States with his family from the Soviet Union at age 6. He earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Maryland, College Park, following his father's and grandfather's path by studying

Stephen Gary "Woz" Wozniak (born August 11, 1950) is an American inventor, electronics engineer, programmer, philanthropist, and technology entrepreneur. In 1976, he co-founded Apple Inc., which later became the world's largest information technology company by revenue and the world's largest company by market capitalization. Wozniak and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs are recognized pioneers of the personal computer revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1975, Wozniak began developing the Apple I into the computer that launched Apple when he and Jobs first started marketing it.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (born 10 December 1815; died 27 November 1852), was an English mathematician and writer. She worked on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a mechanical general-purpose computer. Lovelace first saw the machine's use beyond simple calculation. She wrote the first algorithm intended for that machine. Lovelace is considered the first to grasp a "computing machine's" full potential and an early programmer.

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (born December 9, 1906; died January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. She programmed the Harvard Mark I computer early on. Hopper invented a linker, one of the first linkers. She promoted machine-independent programming languages. This led to COBOL, an early high-level language still used now. Before the Navy, Hopper earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University and taught mathematics at Vassar College.

Gordon Earle Moore (born January 3, 1929) is an American businessman, engineer, and co-founder and chairman emeritus of Intel Corporation. He wrote Moore's law. As of April 2019, Moore's net worth reached $10.4 billion.

Franklin Story Musgrave, M.D. (born August 19, 1935) is an American physician and a retired NASA astronaut. He speaks publicly and consults Disney's Imagineering group and Applied Minds in California. In 1996, Musgrave became the second astronaut to complete six spaceflights. He holds six academic degrees, making him the most formally educated astronaut. Musgrave flew aboard all five Space Shuttles.

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, born June 8, 1955, also known as TimBL, is an English engineer and computer scientist. He invented the World Wide Web. Currently, he holds a Professorial Fellowship in Computer Science at the University of Oxford and is a Professor at MIT. Berners-Lee proposed an information management system on March 12, 1989. He implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server over the internet in mid-November of that year. Berners-Lee directs the World Wide Web.

Charles Simonyi (Hungarian: Simonyi Károly, pronounced [ˈʃimoɲi ˈkaːroj]; born September 10, 1948) is a Hungarian-born American software architect. He started and led Microsoft's applications group. He built the first versions of the Microsoft Office suite of applications there. He founded and led Intentional Software, which Microsoft bought in 2017, aiming to develop and market his intentional programming concept. In April 2007, aboard Soyuz TMA-10, he became the fifth space tourist and the second Hungarian in space. In March 2009, aboard Soyuz TMA-14, he made a second trip to th

Donald Ervin Knuth (kə-NOOTH; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and Stanford University professor emeritus. He won the ACM Turing Award in 1974, often called the Nobel Prize of computer science. He wrote the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. He helped develop rigorous analysis for computational complexity of algorithms. He also systematized formal mathematical techniques for this. This process popularized asymptotic notation.

Konrad Zuse (German: [ˈkɔnʁat ˈtsuːzə]; June 22, 1910 – December 18, 1995) was a German civil engineer, computer scientist, inventor, businessman, and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer. The functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse is often seen as the inventor of the modern computer. Zuse also built the S2 computing machine, considered the first process control computer. He founded one of the earliest computer businesses in 1941, producing

William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954) is an American computer engineer. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim. He served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. As a graduate student at Berkeley, he played a major role in the early development of BSD UNIX. He wrote the original vi text editor. He also wrote the 2000 essay Why The Future Doesn't Need Us, expressing worries about modern technology development.

Lynn Ann Conway (born January 2, 1938) is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer, inventor, and transgender activist. Conway achieved pioneering work, such as the Mead & Conway revolution in VLSI design. This work started an emerging electronic design automation industry. She worked at IBM in the 1960s. Conway invented generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution in most modern computer processors to boost performance.

James Arthur Gosling, born May 19, 1955, is a Canadian computer scientist. He founded and led the design of the Java programming language.

Yukihiro Matsumoto (まつもとゆきひろ, Matsumoto Yukihiro, Matz, born April 14, 1965) is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer. He designed the Ruby programming language and its reference implementation, Matz's Ruby Interpreter (MRI). The Ruby community uses the motto "Matz is nice and so we are nice," abbreviated MINASWAN. As of 2011, Matsumoto serves as the Chief Architect of Ruby at Heroku, an online cloud platform-as-a-service in San Francisco. He is a fellow of the Rakuten Institute of Technology, a research and development institution.

James Henry Clark, born March 23, 1944, is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several Silicon Valley technology companies. These include Silicon Graphics, Inc., Netscape Communications Corporation, myCFO, and Healtheon. His research in computer graphics developed systems for fast rendering of three-dimensional computer images.

Anthony James Barr (born September 24, 1940), known as Tony Barr or Jim Barr, is an American programming language designer, software engineer, and inventor. His notable work includes the Statistical Analysis System (SAS), automated lumber yield optimization, and the Automated Classification of Medical Entities (ACME).

George Boole (November 2, 1815 – December 8, 1864) was an English mathematician, philosopher, and logician who taught mathematics as the first professor at Queen's College, Cork, Ireland. He studied differential equations and algebraic logic. He authored The Laws of Thought (1854), which contains Boolean algebra. Boolean logic laid the groundwork for the information age. Boole stated: No general method exists for solving probability theory questions.

Kenneth Lane Thompson, born February 4, 1943, is an American computer science pioneer. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career. There, he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He invented the B programming language, which preceded the C programming language. Thompson helped create the Plan 9 operating system. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-invented the Go programming language. Other work includes regular expressions and early text editors QED and ed, th.

John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011) was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. McCarthy founded the artificial intelligence discipline. He coined "artificial intelligence" (AI). He developed the Lisp programming language family. McCarthy significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language. He popularized timesharing. McCarthy greatly influenced early AI development. McCarthy spent most of his career at Stanford University. He received honors like the 1971 Turing Award for his work.

William Daniel "Danny" Hillis (born September 25, 1956) is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and scientist. He pioneered parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence. Hillis founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a parallel supercomputer manufacturer. He became a fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering. Recently, Hillis co-founded Applied Minds and Applied Invention, a group of engineers, scientists, and artists. He serves as a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab.

Daniel Kottke was a college friend of Steve Jobs. He was one of the first employees at Apple Inc.

Niklaus Emil Wirth (born February 15, 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist. Wirth designed several programming languages, including Pascal. He pioneered classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Turing Award. The award recognized his work developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.

John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. Backus directed the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language. He invented the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a notation used to define formal language syntax. Backus researched the function-level programming paradigm. He presented his findings in his 1977 Turing Award lecture, "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?" The IEEE awarded Backus the W. W. McDowell Award in 1967 for developing FORTRAN.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – c. October 12, 2011) was an American computer scientist. Ritchie created the C programming language. He created the Unix operating system and B programming language with colleague Ken Thompson. Ritchie and Thompson won the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983. They received the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999. Ritchie headed the Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department until he retired in 2007. He wrote the "R" in K&R C and used the username dmr.

Brian Wilson Kernighan (born January 1, 1942) is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs. Kernighan helped develop Unix alongside Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name gained wide recognition through co-authoring the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan stated he did not design the C language ("it's entirely Dennis Ritchie's work"). Kernighan wrote many Unix programs, including ditroff. Kernighan co-authored the AWK and AMPL programming languages. He is known for the "K" in K&R C and the "K" in AWK bot.

Larry Wall, born September 27, 1954, is an American computer programmer and author. He created the Perl programming language.

Margaret Elaine Heafield Hamilton (born August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She directed the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. That lab developed on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo space program. She later started two software companies: Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hamilton published over 130 papers, proceedings, and reports covering sixty projects and six major programs. She helped coin the term.

James Nicholas Gray (born 1944; disappeared 2007) was an American computer scientist. In 1998, he received the Turing Award for his major contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation.

Guido van Rossum (Dutch: [ˈɣido vɑn ˈrɔsʏm, -səm]; born January 31, 1956) is a Dutch programmer. He is best known as the author of the Python programming language. He served as the "Benevolent dictator for life" (BDFL) until he stepped down from that role in July 2018. Guido van Rossum is currently a member of the Python Steering Council.

Marshall Kirk McKusick, born January 19, 1954, is a computer scientist. He worked on BSD UNIX from the 1980s to FreeBSD today. McKusick led the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and again from 2002 to 2004; he still serves on the board. He serves on the editorial board of ACM Queue Magazine. Friends and colleagues call him "Kirk". McKusick earned his B.S. in electrical engineering from Cornell University. He earned two M.S. degrees (1979 and 1980) and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984.

Eric Paul Allman (born September 2, 1955) is an American computer programmer. He developed sendmail and its predecessor, delivermail, in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley. Allman and Greg Olson co-founded Sendmail, Inc. in 1998.

Leonard Kleinrock, born June 13, 1934, is an American computer scientist. He taught at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Kleinrock made key contributions to computer networking theory. He played an influential role in developing the ARPANET, which came before the Internet, at UCLA.

Bernard Marshall Gordon, born 1927 in Springfield, Massachusetts, is an American engineer, inventor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is called "the father of high-speed analog-to-digital conversion".

Philippe Kahn, born March 16, 1952, is a mathematician, technology innovator, entrepreneur, and founder of four tech companies: Fullpower Technologies, LightSurf Technologies, Starfish Software, and Borland. Kahn created the first camera phone. He pioneered wearable technology intellectual property and wrote many patents covering wearable, eyewear, smartphone, mobile, imaging, wireless, synchronization, and medical technologies.

Bruce Wayne Bastian, born 1948, is an American computer programmer, businessperson, philanthropist, and social activist. Bastian co-founded the WordPerfect Software Company with Alan Ashton in 1978. The company started as Satellite Software International and changed to WordPerfect Corporation in 1982.

Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer. He became "the father of information theory." Shannon founded information theory with the paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," which he published in 1948. He also founded digital circuit design theory in 1937. As a 21-year-old master's student at MIT, he wrote his thesis then, showing electrical applications of Boolean algebra could build any logic.

Kenneth Y. Goldberg, born 1961, is an American artist, writer, inventor, and researcher in robotics and automation. Goldberg is a professor and chair at the University of California, Berkeley's industrial engineering and operations research department. He holds the William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering at Berkeley, with joint roles in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Art Practice, and the School of Information. Goldberg also teaches in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Robert (Bob) Melancton Metcalfe, an engineer-entrepreneur from the United States, helped pioneer the Internet starting in 1970. He co-invented Ethernet and co-founded 3Com. Metcalfe formulated Metcalfe's law. Starting January 2011, he holds the Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship position at The University of Texas at Austin. He also earns the Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise. The IEEE Medal of Honor and National Medal of Technology and Innovation recognize Metcalfe's work developing Ethernet technology.

Stephen Wolfram, born August 29, 1959, is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He works in computer science, mathematics, and theoretical physics. In 2012, the American Mathematical Society named him an inaugural fellow. As a businessman, Wolfram is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. There, he served as chief designer for Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine. His recent work focuses on knowledge-based programming, expanding and refining Mathematica's programming language into what is now called Wolfram.

David Lee Chaum, born 1955, is an American computer scientist and cryptographer. He pioneered cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies. Chaum is recognized as the inventor of digital cash. His 1982 dissertation, "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups," proposes the first known blockchain protocol. The dissertation included the code for the protocol, proposing most of what is in the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Michael Ralph Stonebraker, born October 11, 1943, is a computer scientist specializing in database research. Stonebraker's research and products shape many relational database systems through academic prototypes and commercial startups. He founded many database companies, including Ingres Corporation, Illustra, Paradigm4, StreamBase Systems, Tamr, Vertica, and VoltDB. He also served as chief technical officer of Informix. Stonebraker edited the book Readings in Database Systems. His career splits into two phases: his time at Unive

Julian Lombardi, born November 11, 1956, is an American inventor, author, educator, and computer scientist. He works on socio-computational systems, scalable virtual world technologies, and designing collaborative virtual learning environments.

Ian F. Sommerville, born February 23, 1951, is a British academic. He wrote a popular student textbook on software engineering. He also wrote many other books and papers. Ian worked as a software engineering professor at the University of St Andrews in Scotland until 2014. Ian remains a researcher in systems engineering, system dependability, and social informatics. Ian began advocating for an interdisciplinary approach to system dependability.

Daniel Mark Lewin (Hebrew: דניאל "דני" מארק לוין‎; May 14, 1970 – September 11, 2001), sometimes spelled Levin, was an American–Israeli mathematician and entrepreneur. Lewin co-founded the internet company Akamai Technologies. Lewin was stabbed by a hijacker on American Airlines Flight 11. Lewin was the first person murdered during the attacks.

Anu Garg, born April 5, 1967, is an American author and speaker. Garg founded Wordsmith.org, an online community of word lovers from about 200 countries. His books explore the joy of words. Garg wrote several books on language issues for magazines and newspapers. Garg was a columnist for MSN Encarta and Kahani magazine.

Carver Andress Mead, born May 1, 1934, is an American scientist and engineer. Mead holds the Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Mead taught there for over 40 years. Mead instructed the first female electrical engineering student at Caltech, Louise Kirkbride. Mead coauthored the textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems (1980) with Lynn Conway. Mead pioneered modern microelectronics.

Carl Sassenrath, born in California in 1957, designs operating systems and computer languages. Sassenrath brought multitasking to personal computers in 1985 with the Amiga Computer operating system kernel. He designed the REBOL computer language, the REBOL/IOS collaboration environment, and the Safeworlds AltME private messaging system, among other products. Carl is a Principal Engineer at Roku, Inc.