Louis N. Ridenour

Co-patentee of an early hybrid optical-magnetic information storage system, Ridenour also served as Vice President of Lockheed and as an advisor to President Eisenhower. In 1941 he became the assistant director of...

Allessandro Volta

Inventor of the battery in 1800 and a remotely operated pistol that was a significant forerunner of the telegraph, Volta transformed the understanding of electricity. He was born in Como, Italy, and taught...

Hans Christian Ørsted

Discoverer that electric currents create magnetic fields, Ørsted made an important contribution to our understanding of electromagnetism. He shaped post-Kantian philosophy and advances in science throughout the late 19th century. He was...

Tom Gilb

Developer of software metrics, software inspection, and evolutionary processes, Gilb is an American systems engineer, consultant, and author known for bringing quantitative measurement approaches to software development. Since quantitative measurements are essential...

John (Jack) F. Waters

One of the original key contributors who designed and built MCI's initial Internet service, Waters has served as Chief Technology Officer for Level 3 Communications, Inc., a Denver-based provider of a range...

Maja Mataric

A founding pioneer of the field of socially assistive robotics, Matarić held the Chan Soon-Shiong Endowed Chair and served as Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, with...

Charles M. Herzfeld

Director of DARPA who personally authorized the creation of the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, Herzfeld was an American scientist and scientific manager, particularly for the US Government, best known for...

Robert Mano Fano

Known principally for his work in information theory and the invention of Shannon-Fano coding, Fano was a computer scientist and professor emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of...

Tsutomu Shimomura

Best known for his contributions to lattice gas automata and digital security research, Shimomura has made significant contributions to both computational physics and computer security. In the fall of 1984 he joined the...

Daniel A. Hitchcock

Leader of the effort to expand the Magnetic Fusion Energy Computing Center into NERSC, widely regarded as the best-managed High Performance Computing Center in the world, Hitchcock joined the Department of Energy...

Steven (Steve) N. Goldstein

Co-creator of GLORIAD, a dedicated-wavelength ring around the globe to support computationally-intensive research, Goldstein served as an International Networking Coordinator at the National Science Foundation from 1989 to 2003, functioning as a...

Thelma Estrin

One of the first to apply computer technology to healthcare and medical research, Estrin was a computer scientist and engineer who did pioneering work in the fields of expert systems and biomedical...

Sajal K. Das

Pioneer in research on wireless sensor networks and pervasive and mobile computing, Das has served as the Daniel St. Clair Endowed Chair Professor and chair of the Computer Science department at the...

Geoff Huston

Leader of the initial construction of the Internet in Australia in the late 1980s, Huston is widely regarded as the preeminent researcher on IPv4 exhaustion, routinely referenced by international agencies and frequently...

Marshall Nicholas Rosenbluth

Deriver of the Metropolis algorithm — cited in Computing in Science and Engineering (Jan. 2000) as being among the top 10 algorithms having the "greatest influence on the development and practice of...

Rolf William Landauer

A significant contributor in diverse areas of the thermodynamics of information processing, condensed matter physics, and the conductivity of disordered media, Landauer was a German-American physicist who made important contributions across these...

Brian David Josephson

Winner of a 1/2 share of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering theoretical work on superconductivity, Josephson is a Welsh physicist known for his prediction of the eponymous Josephson effect....

Michael Faraday

A father of electromagnetism and electronics, Faraday studied the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a DC electric current. While conducting these studies, he established the basis for the electromagnetic field concept...

Leonard Max Adleman

Co-inventor of the RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) cryptosystem, Adleman is a theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science and molecular biology at the University of Southern California. RSA is in widespread use in...

Vilhelm Friman Koren Bjerknes

His experiments with electric oscillations contributed much to the development of wireless telegraphy. Bjerknes was a Norwegian physicist and meteorologist who did much to found the modern practice of weather forecasting. He...