Top - pioneers in computer science

Person	Achievement	Ach. Date
John Atanasoff	Built the first electronic digital computer, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer, though it was neither programmable nor Turing-complete.	1939
Charles Babbage	Designed the Analytical Engine and built a prototype for a less powerful mechanical calculator.	1822 1837
John Backus	Invented FORTRAN (Formula Translation), the first practical high-level programming language, and he formulated the Backus–Naur form that described the formal language syntax.	1954 1963
Jean Bartik	One of first computer programmers, on ENIAC (1946), an early Vacuum tube computer back when "programming" involved using cables, dials, and switches to physically rewire the machine. Worked with John Mauchly toward BINAC (1949), EDVAC (1949), UNIVAC (1951) to develop early "Stored program" computers.	1946
George Boole	Formalized Boolean algebra, the basis for digital logic and computer science.	1847 1854
Nikolay Brusentsov	Built ternary computer Setun.	1958
Tim Berners-Lee	Invented worldwide web. With Robert Cailliau, sent first HTTP communication between client and server.	1989 1990
Vannevar Bush	Analogue computing pioneer. Originator of the Memex concept, which led to the development of Hypertext.	1930
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn	Designed the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), the primary data communication protocols of the Internet and other computer networks.	1978
Noam Chomsky	Made contributions to computer science with his work in Linguistics. He developed Chomsky hierarchy, a discovery which has directly impacted Programming language theory and other branches of computer science.	1956
Alonzo Church	Founded contributions to theoretical computer science, specifically for the development of the lambda calculus and the discovery of the undecidability problemwithin it.	1936
Wesley A. Clark	Designed LINC, the first functional computer scaled down and priced for the individual user. Put in service in 1963, many of its features are seen as prototypes of what were to be essential elements of personal computers.	1962
Edmund M. Clarke	Developed model checking and formal verification of software and hardware together with E. Allen Emerson.	1981
Edgar F. Codd	Proposed and formalized the relational model of data management, the theoretical basis of relational databases.	1970
Stephen Cook	Formalized the notion of NP-completeness, inspiring a great deal of research in computational complexity theory.	1971
James Cooley	With John W. Tukey, created the Fast Fourier Transform.	1965
Ole-Johan Dahl	With Kristen Nygaard, invented the proto-object oriented language SIMULA.	1962
Edsger Dijkstra	Made advances in algorithms, Goto considered harmful, the semaphore (programming), rigor, and pedagogy.	1968
J. Presper Eckert	With John Mauchly, designed and built the ENIAC, the first modern (all electronic, Turing-complete) computer, and the UNIVAC I, the first commercially available computer.	1943 1951
E. Allen Emerson	Developed model checking and formal verification of software and hardware together with Edmund M. Clarke.	1981
Douglas Engelbart	Best known for inventing the computer mouse (in a joint effort with Bill English); as a pioneer of human-computer interaction whose Augment team developedhypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs.	1963
Tommy Flowers	Designed and built the Mark 1 and the ten improved Mark 2 Colossus computers, the world’s first programmable, digital, electronic, computing devices.	1943
Gottlob Frege	Developed first-order predicate calculus, which was a crucial precursor requirement to developing computation theory.	1879
Seymour Ginsburg	Proved "don't-care" circuit minimization does not necessarily yield optimal results, proved that the ALGOL programming language is context-free (thus linkingformal language theory to the problem of compiler writing), and invented AFL Theory.	1958 1961 1967
Kurt Gödel	Proved that Peano axiomatized arithmetic could not be both logically consistent and complete in first-order predicate calculus. Church, Kleene, and Turing developed the foundations of computation theory based on corollaries to Gödel's work.	1931
Lois Haibt	Was a member of the ten person team that invented Fortran and among the first women to play a crucial role in the development of computer science.	1954
C.A.R. Hoare	Developed the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) and Quicksort.	1960 1978
Grace Hopper	Pioneered work on the necessity for high-level programming languages, which she termed automatic programming, and wrote the A-O compiler, which heavily influenced the COBOL language.	1952
Cuthbert Hurd	Helped the International Business Machines Corporation develop its first general-purpose computer, the IBM 701.	1952
Kenneth E. Iverson	Assisted in establishing the first graduate course in computer science (at Harvard) and taught that course; invented the APL programming language and made contribution to interactive computing.	1954; 1962
Jacek Karpinski	Developed the first differential analyzer that used transistors, and developed one of the first machine learning algorithms for character and image recognition. Also was the inventor of one of the first minicomputers, the K-202.	1973
Alan Kay	Pioneered many of the ideas at the root of object-oriented programming languages, led the team that developed Smalltalk, and made fundamental contributions to personal computing.	1970~
Stephen Cole Kleene	Pioneered work with Alonzo Church on the Lambda Calculus that first laid down the foundations of computation theory.	1936
Donald Knuth	Wrote The Art of Computer Programming and created TeX.	1968 1989
Leslie Lamport	Formulated algorithms to solve many fundamental problems in distributed systems (e.g. the bakery algorithm). Developed the concept of a logical clock, enabling synchronization between distributed entities based on the events through which they communicate.	1974 1978
Sergei Alekseyevich Lebedev	Independently designed the first electronic computer in the Soviet Union, MESM, in Kiev, Ukraine.	1951
Gottfried Leibniz	Made advances in symbolic logic, such as the Calculus ratiocinator, that were heavily influential on Gottlob Frege. Made developments in first-order predicate calculus that were crucial for the theoretical foundations of computer science.	1670~
Ramon Llull	Designed multiple symbolic representations machines, and pioneered notions of symbolic representation and manipulation to produce knowledge—both of which were major influences on Leibniz.	1300~
J. C. R. Licklider	Began the investigation of human-computer interaction, leading to many advances in computer interfaces as well as in cybernetics and artificial intelligence.	1960
Ada Lovelace	Began the study of scientific computation, analyzing Babbage's work in her Sketch of the Analytical Engine, and was the namesake for the Ada programming language.	1843
John Mauchly	With J. Presper Eckert, designed and built the ENIAC, the first modern (all electronic, Turing-complete) computer, and the UNIVAC I, the first commercially available computer. Also worked on BINAC(1949), EDVAC(1949), UNIVAC(1951) with Grace Hopper and Jean Bartik, to develop early "Stored program" computers.	1943 1951
John McCarthy	Invented LISP, a functional programming language.	1955
Marvin Minsky	Co-founder of Artificial Intelligence Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of several texts on AI and philosophy.	1963
Peter Naur	Edited the Algol 60 Revised Report, introducing Backus-Naur form	1960
Max Newman	Instigated the production of the Colossus computers at Bletchley Park. After the war he established the Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester where the world’s first Stored-program computer, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine was invented.	1943
John von Neumann	Formulated the von Neumann architecture upon which most modern computers are based.	1945
Kristen Nygaard	With Ole-Johan Dahl, invented the proto-object oriented language SIMULA.	1962
Blaise Pascal	Invented the mechanical calculator.	1642
Emil L. Post	Developed the Post machine as a model of computation, independently of Turing. Known also for developing truth tables, the Post correspondence problem used in recursion theory as well as proving what is known as Post's theorem.	1936
Bertrand Russell	Made contributions to computer science with his work on Mathematical logic (example: Truth function). Introduced the notion of Type theory. He also introducedType system (along with Alfred North Whitehead) in his work, Principia Mathematica.	1910
Gerard Salton	A pioneer of automatic information retrieval, who proposed the vector space model and the inverted index.	1975
Dennis Ritchie andKen Thompson	Pioneered the C programming language and the UNIX computer operating system at Bell Labs.	1967
Claude Shannon	Founded information theory and practical digital circuit design.	1937 1948
Herbert A. Simon	A political scientist and economist who pioneered artificial intelligence. Co-creator of the Logic Theory Machine and the General Problem Solver programs.	1956 1957
Ivan Sutherland	Author of Sketchpad, the ancestor of modern computer-aided drafting (CAD) programs and one of the early examples of object-oriented programming.	1963
John W. Tukey	With James Cooley, created the Fast Fourier Transform.	1965
Alan Turing	Made several founding contributions to computer science, including the Turing machine computational model, and ACE design.	1936
Willis Ware	Co-designer of JOHNNIAC. Chaired committee that developed the Code of Fair Information Practice and led to the Privacy Act of 1974. Vice-chair of the Privacy Protection Study Commission.	1955 1960s 1974
Adriaan van Wijngaarden	Developer of the W-grammar first used in the definition of Algol 68	1968
Maurice Wilkes	Built the first practical stored program computer (EDSAC) to be completed and for being credited with the ideas of several high-level programming language constructs.	1949
Sophie Wilson	Wrote BBC Basic programming language. Also designed the ARM architecture and Firepath processors	1981 1985
Niklaus Wirth	Designed the Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon programming languages.	1970 1978
Konrad Zuse	Built the first functional tape-stored program-controlled computer, the Z3. The Z3 was proven to be Turing-complete in 1998.	1941