Russell Lincoln Ackoff

Recognized as the "Father of Operations Research" for helping establish one of the world's first Departments of Operations Research, Ackoff is also celebrated internationally as a pragmatic academic, systems thinker, and prolific...

Cordell Green

Founder of the Kestrel Institute and known for his research in knowledge-based software engineering, Green has served as Director and Chief Scientist of Kestrel Institute, which he founded in 1981. He was...

Henryk Zygalski

Designer of the "perforated sheets," also known as "Zygalski sheets," a manual device for finding Enigma settings, Zygalski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who worked at breaking German Enigma ciphers before...

Stephen Warshall

Developer of the transitive closure algorithm known as Warshall's algorithm, Warshall made foundational contributions to graph analysis for finding shortest paths in a weighted graph. Born in New York City, Warshall went to...

Eric Horvitz

Recognized for playing a significant role in establishing the credibility of artificial intelligence, Horvitz has also helped establish the link between artificial intelligence and decision science. Horvitz coined the concept of bounded...

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,...

Ken E. Batcher

Designer of the Massively Parallel Processor, Batcher created one of the most significant parallel computing architectures of its era. Among the designs Batcher worked on at Goodyear were the: Massively Parallel Processor (16,384...

James T. Pendergrass

Instrumental in establishing the naval cryptologic service's pioneering program to develop electronic digital computers, Pendergrass shaped the early development of computing in the U.S. Navy. Born in Bala Cynwyd, PA, he earned...

Clifford Hugh Dowker

Developer of the Dowker notation, a simple way of describing knots suitable for computers, Dowker was a topologist also known for his contributions in point-set topology, category theory, sheaf theory, and knot...

Leonardo Torres y Quevedo

Pioneer in remote control technology, Torres y Quevedo developed the Telekino — a robot that executed commands transmitted by electromagnetic waves — presenting it at the Paris Academy of Science in 1903. A...

William (Velvel) Morton Kahan

One of the foremost experts on floating-point computations, Kahan is recognized for his fundamental contributions to numerical analysis and has dedicated himself to "making the world safe for numerical computations." Among his...

Lewis Fry Richardson

Pioneer of fractals and the modified Richardson iteration method for solving systems of linear equations, Richardson was also an English mathematician, physicist, meteorologist, psychologist, and pacifist who pioneered modern mathematical techniques of...

Robin Milner

A Turing Award-winning pioneer of theoretical computer science, Milner shaped the formal understanding of computation through foundational contributions. He developed Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS), a landmark formalism for modeling concurrent processes,...

Michael Oser Rabin

Author of the landmark joint paper "Finite Automata and Their Decision Problems," which introduced nondeterministic machines and had a lasting impact on automata theory, Rabin and co-author Dana S. Scott were cited...

Herman Heine Goldstine

One of the original developers of the ENIAC, Goldstine left the University of Michigan, where he was a professor, in July 1942 to enlist in the Army after the United States entered...

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...

John Warner Backus

Leader of the team that invented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, Backus also invented the Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax. He...

Jorma J. Rissanen

Known for inventing arithmetic coding and the minimum description length principle, Rissanen was an IBM researcher from 1960 who received his Ph.D. from the Helsinki University of Technology in 1965. After retiring...

Thomas M. Cover

Known for developing the relationship between information theory and statistics, Cover served as past President of the IEEE Information Theory Society and was a Fellow of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics and...

Kishor S. Trivedi

A leading international expert in reliability and performability evaluation of dependable systems, Trivedi has made seminal contributions to stochastic modeling formalisms and their efficient solution. He has held the Hudson Chair in...