PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: computer science
American mathematician
John von Neumann was a 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...
American engineer
Vannevar Bush was an 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...
British mathematician and logician
Alan Turing was a 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...
WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange is an Australian computer programmer who founded the media organization WikiLeaks. Practicing what he called “scientific journalism”—i.e., providing primary source materials with a minimum...
American computer scientist
Lynn Conway was a trailblazing computer scientist, often called the “hidden hand” of microchip design. One of the first Americans to undergo gender-affirming surgery, Conway was also a prominent advocate...
British computer scientist
Demis Hassabis is an English computer scientist who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work using artificial intelligence (AI) to predict protein structures. He shared half the prize...
South Korean physician, educator, and entrepreneur
Ahn Cheol-Soo is a 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...
English-born Italian computer programmer
Blessed Carlo Acutis ; beatified October 10, 2020) was an English-born Italian computer programmer who was beatified (the second of three stages in the process of canonization) by the Roman Catholic Church...
American computer programmer, businessman, and philanthropist
Bill Gates is an 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...
American computer-game designer
John Carmack is an American computer-game designer whose pioneering work on three-dimensional game design led to the popularization of the “first-person shooter” genre, exemplified by such hugely successful...
American computer programmer and entrepreneur
Mark Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer who was cofounder of the social networking site Facebook. Zuckerberg serves as CEO (2004– ) of both Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms. What...
British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist
Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist known as the “godfather of AI.” He revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence with his work on neural network...
American electronics engineer
Steve Wozniak is an American electronics engineer who cofounded, with Steve Jobs, Apple Computer and designed the Apple II, the first commercially successful personal computer. Wozniak—or “Woz,” as he...
American software developer and entrepreneur
Bill Joy is an American software developer, entrepreneur, and cofounder of the computer manufacturer Sun Microsystems. Joy devised a version of the UNIX operating system, Berkeley UNIX, that used the TCP/IP...
American businessman
Danny Hillis is an 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...
American business executive
Larry Ellison is an 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...
Canadian computer scientist
Gilles Brassard is a Canadian computer scientist known for his work in quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation. Brassard received bachelor’s (1972) and master’s (1975) degrees in computer science...
Finnish computer scientist
Linus Torvalds is a 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
Vinton Cerf is an 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...
American investor and philanthropist
Paul Allen was an 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...
American computer scientist and futurist
Ray Kurzweil is an American computer scientist and futurist who pioneered pattern-recognition technology and proselytized the inevitability of humanity’s merger with the technology it created. Kurzweil...
British computer scientist
Maurice Wilkes was a 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
John M. Jumper is an American computer scientist who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work using artificial intelligence (AI) to find the three-dimensional structure of proteins. He...
American inventor
Douglas Engelbart was an 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...
American scientist
Marvin Minsky was an 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...
American computer scientist
Leonard Kleinrock is an 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...
American architect and computer scientist
Nicholas Negroponte is an American architect and computer scientist who was the founding director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory and founded One Laptop per Child (OLPC)....
American computer scientist
Robert Kahn is an 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...
American computer scientist
Edward Albert Feigenbaum is 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 was an 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....
American Web developer and entrepreneur
David Karp is an 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...
Australian-American scientist
Rodney Brooks is an Australian computer scientist, artificial intelligence scientist, and designer of mobile autonomous robots. While attending Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, where he...
American computer scientist
Allen Newell was an 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,...
British inventor and mathematician
Charles Babbage was an 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...
American computer scientist
Lawrence Roberts was an 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...
British engineer
Tom Kilburn was a British engineer and co-inventor 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 electrical engineer
Paul Baran was an American electrical engineer, inventor of the distributed network and, contemporaneously with British computer scientist Donald Davies, of data packet switching across distributed networks....
American engineer
Jay Wright Forrester was an American electrical engineer and management expert who invented the random-access magnetic core memory, the information-storage device employed in most digital computers. He...
American computer scientist
Leslie Valiant is a 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...
American software engineer and businesswoman
Marissa Mayer is an 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...
American computer scientist
Fred Brooks was an 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,...
American computer scientist
Leslie Lamport is an American computer scientist who was awarded the 2013 Turing Award for explaining and formulating the behaviour of distributed computing systems (i.e., systems made up of multiple autonomous...
South African-born mathematician and computer scientist
Seymour Papert was a South African-born mathematician and computer scientist who was best known for his contributions to the understanding of children’s learning processes and to the ways in which technology...
Indian-born American executive
Sundar Pichai is an Indian-born American executive who was CEO of both Google, Inc. (2015– ), and its holding company, Alphabet Inc. (2019– ). As a boy growing up in Madras, Pichai slept with his brother...
American computer programmer
Richard Stallman is an 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...
British scientist
Tim Berners-Lee is a 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 is an 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 entrepreneur
Sergey Brin is an 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...
British computer scientist
Robin Milner was an 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...
American software engineer
Marc Andreessen is an 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...
