- Alan Turing
This short on-line biography of Alan Turing is based on the entry I wrote for the British Dictionary of National Biography in 1995. The eight parts correspond roughly to the eight sections of my full biography Alan Turing : the enigma. There are no hyperlinks in the text. For links and for more images, go to the corresponding page of the Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook. Part 8 - Alan Turing 's Crisis
- David May
David May is a British chip designer and computer scientist. David May joined the British company INMOS in 1979, based in Bristol. Here he was the architect of the transputer microprocessor, designed to run the occam programming language. He is now a professor, at the University of Bristol. May's Law: Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore's Law.
- Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Tim Berners-Lee Founder of the World Wide Web
- Donald Knuth
Don's father was a Lutheran school teacher and church organist. Don studied piano, and for a brief time organ, through high school. Later as a faculty member of Caltech, he was called upon to be a long-term substitute organist at Faith Lutheran Church in Pasadena, California. He became a member of the American Guild of Organists in 1965, and saw his first Abbott and Sieker organ at that time.
- Jim Gray
James Nicholas "Jim" Gray (born 1944, lost at sea January 28, 2007) is an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation."
- Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky is here critical of many current researchers in artificial intelligence researchers who he feels have gotten bogged down in theories of machine learning. He sees this as a crisis point in a time of an aging population that he feels will need help in performing many tasks. "We have a computer program that can beat a world chess champion, but we don’t have one that can reach for an umbrella on a rainy day, or put a pillow in a pillow case."
- John von Neumann
John von Neumann (born Margittai Neumann János Lajos on December 28, 1903 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary; died February 8, 1957 in Washington D.C., United States) was a Austria-Hungary-born American mathematician who made contributions to quantum physics, functional analysis, set theory, topology, economics, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics (of explosions), …
- Grace Hopper
Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy officer. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I calculator, and she developed the first compiler for a computer programming language. Because of the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as "Amazing Grace".
- John McCarthy
John McCarthy (born September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts, sometimes known affectionately as Uncle John McCarthy), is a prominent computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence. He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. McCarthy championed mathematical logic for Artificial Intelligence.
- Paul Graham
Paul Graham (b. Weymouth, England, 1964) is a Lisp programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist. He is the author of "On Lisp" (1993), "ANSI Common Lisp" (1995), and "Hackers & Painters" (2004).
- Bill Joy
Bill Joy served as Sun's Chief Scientist until 2003, and is now a partner with venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.
- David Gelernter
David Hillel Gelernter (b. 1955) is a professor of computer science at Yale University. In the 1980s, he made seminal contributions to the field of parallel computation, specifically the tuple space coordination model, as embodied by the Linda programming system. Bill Joy attributes Linda as the inspiration for many elements of JavaSpaces and Jini.
- Vint Cerf
Vinton Gray Cerf (born June 23, 1943) (last name pronounced just like the English word "surf") is an American computer scientist who is commonly referred to as one of the "founding fathers of the Internet" for his key technical and managerial role, together with Bob Kahn, in the creation of the Internet and the TCP/IP protocols which it uses. He was also a co-founder (in 1992) of the Internet Society (ISOC), …
- Vernor Vinge
Vernor Steffen Vinge (born October 2, 1944 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, USA) is a retired San Diego State University Professor of Mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author. He is best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels "A Fire Upon the Deep" (1992) and "A Deepness in the Sky" (1999), as well as for his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity", …
- Christos Papadimitriou
Christos Papadimitriou is a Professor in the Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He studied at the National Technical University of Athens (BS in Electrical Engineering, 1972) and at Princeton University (MS in Electrical Engineering, 1974 and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1976). He has also taught at Harvard, MIT, the National Technical University of Athens, Stanford, and UCSD.
- Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte (born December 1, 1943) is a Greek-American architect and computer scientist best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and also known as the founder of The One Laptop per Child association (OLPC).
- Larry Wall
Larry Wall (born September 27, 1954) is a programmer, linguist, and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987. Wall earned his bachelor's degree from Seattle Pacific University in 1976. Wall is the author of the rn Usenet client and the nearly universally used patch program.
- Joseph Weizenbaum
Joseph Weizenbaum (Berlin, January 8, 1923) is a professor emeritus of computer science at MIT. Born in Berlin to Jewish parents, he escaped Nazi Germany in 1936, emigrating with his family to the United States. He started studying mathematics in 1941 in the US, but his studies were interrupted by the war, during which he served in the military. Around 1950 he worked on analog computers, and helped create a digital computer for Wayne State University.
- Bjarne Stroustrup
Bjarne Stroustrup (born December 30, 1950 in Aarhus, Denmark) is a computer scientist and the College of Engineering Chair Professor of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. He is most notable for developing the C++ programming language. A rough English attempt at pronunciation of his name would be "B-yar-ne Strov-stroop". Stroustrup, in his own words, "invented C++, wrote its early definitions, …
- Steve Wozniak
Dr. Stephan Gary "Woz" Wozniak (born August 11 1950 in San Jose, California) is a U.S. computer engineer and the co-founder of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), with Steve Jobs. His inventions and machines are credited with contributing greatly to the personal computer revolution of the 1970s. Wozniak created the Apple I and Apple II computers in the mid-1970s. The Apple II gained a sizable amount of popularity, …
- Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 - February 24, 2001), an American electrical engineer and mathematician, has been called "the father of information theory", and was the founder of practical digital circuit design theory.
- Peter Norvig
Peter Norvig is an American computer scientist. He is currently the Director of Research (formerly Director of Search Quality) at Google Inc.. He is a Fellow and Councilor of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and co-author, with Stuart Russell, of "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach", now the standard college text.
- Ken Thompson
Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4 1943), commonly referred to as Ken Thompson (or simply Ken in hacker circles), is an American pioneer of computer science notable for his work with the B programming language and his shepherding the UNIX and Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating systems.
- Dennis Ritchie
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941) is an American computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and Unix. He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. Ritchie is currently the head of Lucent Technologies' System Software Research Department.
- Guido van Rossum
Guido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a "Benevolent Dictator for Life", meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary.
- Edsger W. Dijkstra
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (May 11, 1930 - August 6, 2002); IPA:) was a Dutch computer scientist. He received the 1972 A. C. M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions in the area of programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until his death in 2002.
- Grady Booch
Grady Booch (born February 271955) is a software designer, a software methodologist and a design pattern enthusiast. He is chief scientist of Rational Software (now a part of IBM) and a series editor for Benjamin/Cummings. In 1995 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He was named an IBM Fellow in 2003. Booch is best known for developing the Unified Modeling Language with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh.
- Edward Felten
Edward Felten, a Princeton University computer scientist, hid and disabled the browser with a removal program he wrote while serving as a government witness during the antitrust trial in 1998. But in court, Microsoft adroitly demonstrated that, the way its software is written, Internet Explorer shows up unexpectedly now and then -- no matter how well the program is hidden -- backing its contention that the browser is integral to the operating system.
- Niklaus Wirth
Niklaus E. Wirth (b. February 15, 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984 he won the Turing Award for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.
- Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram is a scientist, author, and business leader. He is the creator of Mathematica , the author of A New Kind of Science , and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. His career has been characterized by a sequence of original and significant achievements. Born in London in 1959, Wolfram was educated at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech.
- Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (December 10, 1815 - November 27, 1852), born Augusta Ada Byron, is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine.
- Rodney Brooks
Rodney Allen Brooks (b. December 30, 1954 in Adelaide) is Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is Chief Technical Officer and sits on the Board of iRobot Corp. From July 1, 2003 until June 30, 2007, he was director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; prior to that, he was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
- Seymour Papert
Seymour Papert (born March 1, 1928 Pretoria, South Africa) is an MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and prominent educator. He is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, as well as an inventor of the Logo programming language.
- Luis von Ahn
Luis von Ahn Named One of Worldâs Top Young Innovators: Technology Review Magazine To Honor Carnegie Mellon Computer Scientist
- Anita Borg
Anita Borg was born Anita Borg Naffz in Chicago, Illinois. She grew up in Palatine, Illinois, Kaneohe, Hawaii, and Mukilteo, Washington.
- Jack Dongarra
Jack Dongarra is a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee. He holds the position of a Distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory , and is an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rice University.
- Brian Kernighan
Brian Wilson Kernighan, (born 1942 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed greatly to Unix and its school of thought. He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie.
- Rudy Rucker
Rudolf von Bitter Rucker (born March 22, 1946 in Louisville, Kentucky) is an American computer scientist and science fiction author, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which ("Software" and "Wetware") both won Philip K. Dick Awards. Rucker is the great-great-great-grandson of the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. (Cf.
- John Backus
John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language (FORTRAN) and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax. He also did research in function-level programming and helped to popularize it. The IEEE awarded Backus the W.W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN.
- Sebastian Thrun
Sebastian Thrun is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he also serves as the Director of the Stanford AI Lab. His research focuses on robotics and artificial intelligence. Thrun has delivered numerous invited plenary presentations at leading conferences and symposia (a list is available here ). He served as the inaugural general conference chair of Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2005 .