Edith Clarke

Pioneer of electrical engineering and the inventor of the Clarke calculator, Clarke broke barriers as the first woman to earn an M.S. in electrical engineering from MIT. Clarke studied mathematics and astronomy at...

John Edward Hopcroft

Recognized for fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures, Hopcroft is an American theoretical computer scientist. His textbooks on theory of computation (also known as the Cinderella...

Horst Feistel

Initiator of research that culminated in the development of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), Feistel was a German-born cryptographer who worked on the design of ciphers at IBM. Born in Berlin, Germany,...

Kurt Gödel

Known for his two incompleteness theorems, Gödel heavily influenced the sciences and mathematics. Published in 1931 when he was 25 years of age, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University...

Maxwell (Max) Herman Alexander Newman

Head of the department that built the world's first electronic stored-program digital computer, Newman was a British mathematician and codebreaker born in Chelsea, London, England. He attended Goodrich Road School, then City...

Michael Mascagni

One of the first to use random number-based algorithms on the massively parallel Connection Machine at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC, Mascagni's family moved from Bologna, Italy to Lake Forest,...

Leonid Genrikhovich Khachiyan

Known for his Ellipsoid Algorithm for linear programming, Khachiyan proved the existence of an efficient way to solve linear programming problems thought to be intractable until that time. His 1979 breakthrough dealt...

John Napier

Renowned as the discoverer of the logarithm and inventor of "Napier's bones," Napier was a Scottish mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and astrologer, and also the 8th Laird of Merchiston. He was the son...

John Wilder Tukey

Known for his contributions to the spectral analysis of random processes and the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm, Tukey left a profound mark on modern statistics and signal processing. During World War II,...

Ronald Linn Rivest

One of the inventors of the RSA algorithm (along with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman), Rivest has made ingenious contributions to making public-key cryptography useful in practice. He also invented the symmetric...

Mavis Batey (née Lever)

One of Bletchley Park's most effective codebreakers, Batey joined the team in May 1940 at just 19 years old, interrupting her German-language studies at University College London. Working under the eccentric cryptographer...

Richard Ernest Bellman

Developer of dynamic programming, Bellman made foundational contributions to mathematics and computer science by introducing a method for solving complex problems by breaking them down into simpler sub-problems. An American applied mathematician...

Claude Elwood Shannon

Developer of Information Theory, the basis for the design of communication systems and networks, Shannon also noted the importance of Boolean theory for the design of logic circuits whilst still a student...

Roberto Tamassia

Pioneer in the field of graph drawing and major contributor to the design of graph and geometric algorithms, Tamassia has served as Plastech Professor of Computer Science at Brown University in Providence,...

Lotfi Askar Zadeh

Best known for his theory of fuzzy logic, Zadeh proposed using a membership function (with a range covering the interval [0,1]) operating on the domain of all possible values. He proposed new...

Jozef Gruska

A pioneer in the theory of quantum computing and organizing activities in the field, Gruska graduated in mathematics from Commenius University in Bratislava and received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the...

A.J. Han Vinck

Recipient of the IEEE ISPLC2006 Achievement award for his contributions to Power Line Communications, Vinck has also held a chair for Digital Communications at the Institute for Experimental Mathematics at the University...

Amir Pnueli

Pioneer of temporal logic in computing science, Pnueli made a major breakthrough in the verification and certification of concurrent and reactive systems with his landmark 1977 paper "The Temporal Logic of Programs,"...

Abdal Mammad ibn M Khwrizm

Considered the founder of algebra, Khwrizm shared this credit with Diophantus. His Kitab al-Jabr wa-l-Muqabala presented the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations. In the twelfth century, Latin translations of...

Steve Mann

Pioneer in the development of wearable computers and reality mediators in research towards cybernetics, Mann has been one of the founding members of the Wearable Computers group in the Media Lab at...