PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: computer science
American mathematician
John von Neumann, Hungarian-born American mathematician. As an adult, he appended von to his surname; the hereditary title had been granted his father in 1913. Von Neumann grew from child prodigy to one...
American engineer
Vannevar Bush, American electrical engineer and administrator who developed the Differential Analyzer and oversaw government mobilization of scientific research during World War II. The son of a Universalist...
British mathematician and logician
Alan Turing, British mathematician and logician who made major contributions to mathematics, cryptanalysis, logic, philosophy, and mathematical biology and also to the new areas later named computer science,...
Australian computer programmer
Julian Assange, Australian computer programmer who founded the media organization WikiLeaks. Practicing what he called “scientific journalism”—i.e., providing primary source materials with a minimum of...
American electronics engineer
Steve Wozniak, American electronics engineer, cofounder, with Steve Jobs, of Apple Computer, and designer of the first commercially successful personal computer. Wozniak—or “Woz,” as he was commonly known—was...
American computer programmer, businessman, and philanthropist
Bill Gates, American computer programmer and entrepreneur who cofounded Microsoft Corporation, the world’s largest personal-computer software company. Gates wrote his first software program at the age...
American businessman
Danny Hillis, American pioneer of parallel processing computers and founder of Thinking Machines Corporation. The son of a U.S. Air Force epidemiologist, Hillis spent his early years traveling abroad with...
South Korean physician, educator, and entrepreneur
Ahn Cheol-Soo, physician, educator, politician, and computer entrepreneur who founded AhnLab, Inc., South Korea’s largest Internet security firm. He later entered politics, establishing the People’s Party...
American business executive
Larry Ellison, American businessman and entrepreneur who was cofounder and chief executive officer (1977–2014) of the software company Oracle Corporation. His mother, Florence Spellman, was a 19-year-old...
American inventor
Douglas Engelbart, American inventor whose work beginning in the 1950s led to his patent for the computer mouse, the development of the basic graphical user interface (GUI), and groupware. Engelbart won...
British computer scientist
Maurice Wilkes, British computer science pioneer who helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), the first full-size stored-program computer, and invented microprogramming....
American computer scientist
Vinton Cerf, American computer scientist who is considered one of the founders, along with Robert Kahn, of the Internet. In 2004 both Cerf and Kahn won the A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer...
American computer scientist and futurist
Ray Kurzweil, American computer scientist and futurist who pioneered pattern-recognition technology and proselytized the inevitability of humanity’s merger with the technology it created. Kurzweil was...
American scientist
Marvin Minsky, American mathematician and computer scientist, one of the most famous practitioners of the science of artificial intelligence (AI). Minsky won the 1969 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour...
American computer scientist
Leonard Kleinrock, American computer scientist who developed the mathematical theory behind packet switching and who sent the first message between two computers on a network that was a precursor of the...
American investor and philanthropist
Paul Allen, American investor and philanthropist best known as the cofounder of Microsoft Corporation, a leading developer of personal-computer software systems and applications. Allen was raised in Seattle,...
American computer scientist
Edward Albert Feigenbaum, an American systems analyst and the most important pioneer in the development of expert systems in artificial intelligence (AI). The son of an accountant, Feigenbaum was especially...
American engineer and entrepreneur
Gordon Moore, American engineer and cofounder, with Robert Noyce, of Intel Corporation. Moore studied chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley (B.S., 1950), and in 1954 he received a Ph.D. in...
British engineer
Tom Kilburn, British engineer and coinventor of the first working computer memory. Kilburn also designed and built the first stored-program computer and led a team that produced a succession of pioneering...
American computer scientist
Robert Kahn, American electrical engineer, one of the principal architects, with Vinton Cerf, of the Internet. In 2004 both Kahn and Cerf won the A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science,...
Australian-American scientist
Rodney Brooks, Australian computer scientist, artificial intelligence scientist, and designer of mobile autonomous robots. While attending Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, where he received...
Finnish computer scientist
Linus Torvalds, Finnish computer scientist who was the principal force behind the development of the Linux operating system. At age 10 Torvalds began to dabble in computer programming on his grandfather’s...
American computer scientist
Lawrence Roberts, American computer scientist who supervised the construction of the ARPANET, a computer network that was a precursor to the Internet. Roberts received bachelor’s (1959), master’s (1960),...
American computer scientist
Allen Newell, American computer scientist and one of the pioneers of the science of artificial intelligence (AI). Newell and his longtime collaborator Herbert A. Simon won the 1975 A.M. Turing Award, the...
British inventor and mathematician
Charles Babbage, English mathematician and inventor who is credited with having conceived the first automatic digital computer. In 1812 Babbage helped found the Analytical Society, whose object was to...
American engineer
Jay Wright Forrester, American electrical engineer and management expert who invented the random-access magnetic core memory, the information-storage device employed in most digital computers. He also...
American computer scientist
Leslie Valiant, Hungarian-born American computer scientist and winner of the 2010 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, “for his fundamental contributions to the development of computational...
American electrical engineer
Paul Baran, American electrical engineer, inventor of the distributed network and, contemporaneously with British computer scientist Donald Davies, of data packet switching across distributed networks....
American computer scientist
Fred Brooks, American computer scientist and winner of the 1999 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for his “landmark contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and...
British computer scientist
Robin Milner, English computer scientist and winner of the 1991 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for his work with automatic theorem provers, the ML computer programming language,...
American Web developer and entrepreneur
David Karp, American Web developer and entrepreneur who founded the microblogging site Tumblr. Karp grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the elder of two sons of a teacher and a composer. He became...
British scientist
Tim Berners-Lee, British computer scientist, generally credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web. In 2004 he was awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and the inaugural...
Egyptian activist and computer engineer
Wael Ghonim, Egyptian democracy activist and computer engineer who was one of the organizers of a social media campaign that helped spur mass demonstrations in 2011 in Egypt, forcing Pres. Hosni Mubarak...
American software engineer and businesswoman
Marissa Mayer, American software engineer and businesswoman who greatly influenced the development of Google Inc., the world’s leading search engine company, in its early years. She later served as CEO...
American software engineer
Marc Andreessen, American-born software engineer who played a key role in creating the Web browser Mosaic and who cofounded Netscape Communications Corporation. While still in grammar school, Andreessen...
American entrepreneur
Sergey Brin, American computer scientist and entrepreneur who created, along with Larry Page, the online search engine Google, one of the most successful sites on the Internet. Brin’s family moved from...
American computer programmer
Richard Stallman, American computer programmer and free-software advocate who founded (1985) the Free Software Foundation. Stallman earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard University in 1974....
American engineer
Seymour Cray, American electronics engineer and computer designer who was the preeminent designer of the large high-speed computers known as supercomputers. Cray graduated from the University of Minnesota...
Israeli-American computer scientist
Judea Pearl, Israeli-American computer scientist and winner of the 2011 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for his “fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence.” Pearl...
American computer game developer and space tourist
Richard Garriott, British-born American computer-game developer who became the sixth space tourist and the first second-generation American to go into space. Garriott grew up in Houston the son of National...
United States naval officer and mathematician
Grace Hopper, American mathematician and rear admiral in the U.S. Navy who was a pioneer in developing computer technology, helping to devise UNIVAC I, the first commercial electronic computer, and naval...
Israeli American mathematician
Michael Oser Rabin, German-born Israeli American mathematician and computer scientist and cowinner of the 1976 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science. Rabin and the American mathematician...
American computer scientist
Kenneth Lane Thompson, American computer scientist and cowinner of the 1983 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science. Thompson and the American computer scientist Dennis M. Ritchie were...
American computer scientist
James Nicholas Gray, American computer scientist and winner of the 1998 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for his “seminal contributions to database and transaction processing...
American computer scientist
Dennis M. Ritchie, American computer scientist and cowinner of the 1983 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science. Ritchie and the American computer scientist Kenneth L. Thompson were cited...
American mathematician
Evelyn Granville, American mathematician who was one of the first African American women to receive a doctoral degree in mathematics. Boyd received an undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics from...
British mathematician
Ada Lovelace, English mathematician, an associate of Charles Babbage, for whose prototype of a digital computer she created a program. She has been called the first computer programmer. Lovelace was the...
American computer scientist
Leonard M. Adleman, American computer scientist and cowinner, with American computer scientist Ronald L. Rivest and Israeli cryptographer Adi Shamir, of the 2002 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in...
American mathematician and computer scientist
Alan Jay Perlis, American mathematician and computer scientist. He was the first winner, in 1966, of the A.M. Turing Award, given by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and recognized internationally...
English mathematician
James H. Wilkinson, English mathematician and winner of the 1970 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science. Wilkinson is recognized as one of the greatest pioneers in numerical analysis,...