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...

David M. Young

Founder of the Center for Numerical Analysis at The University of Texas at Austin, Young was also known for establishing the Successive Overrelaxation (SOR) method. Professor Young's career and many contributions almost exactly...

Norbert Wiener

Founder of cybernetics, Wiener pioneered the study of stochastic and noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems. Cybernetics, the field he founded, formalized the notion of...

Richard Edwin Stearns

1993 ACM Turing Award recipient, Stearns is a prominent computer scientist who, with Juris Hartmanis, was recognized "in recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational...

Ole-Johan Dahl

One of the fathers of object-oriented programming and Simula, Dahl produced the initial ideas for object-oriented (OO) programming in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center (NR) as part of the Simula...

Peter Goddard

A mathematical physicist who helped establish a permanent Archives Center at the IAS, Goddard is known for his contributions to string theory and conformal field theory, including the no-ghost theorem (proved together...

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...

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...

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,"...

John von Neumann

Generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians in modern history, von Neumann made major contributions to a vast range of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, continuous...

Gregory John Chaitin

One of the founders of algorithmic information theory and a key figure in metamathematics, Chaitin is an Argentine-American mathematician and computer scientist born in Argentina. Beginning in the late 1960s, he made...

Edward Fredkin

A pioneer of reversible computing and cellular automata, Fredkin was also an early pioneer of digital physics, later using the term digital philosophy (DP) to describe his work. While Konrad Zuse's book,...

Ramon Llull

A pioneer of computation theory, Llull was a Majorcan writer and philosopher who wrote the first major work of Catalan literature. Recently-surfaced manuscripts show him to have anticipated, by several centuries, prominent...

Karl Kempf

Pioneer in applying advanced mathematics to industrial and engineering challenges, Kempf is best known for heading a group of mathematicians at Stanford University who built computer models allowing Intel to design financial...

Grigore Constantin Moisil

Considered the father of computer science in Romania, Moisil made foundational contributions to automata theory, many-valued algebras, and mathematical logic. Grigore Moisil attended primary school in Bucharest, then high school in Vaslui and...

Judea Pearl

A pioneer of the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks, Pearl is an Israeli American computer scientist and philosopher. His work demonstrated empirical success in numerous applications...

Hans Peter Luhn

Creator of the Luhn algorithm and KWIC (Key Words In Context) indexing, Luhn was a computer scientist for IBM whose work is in wide use today. The Luhn algorithm, or Luhn formula,...

Gertrude Blanch

Pioneering figure in numerical analysis and computation and one of the founders of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Blanch was born Gittel Kaimowitz in Kolno, Russia (now Kolno, Poland), arrived in...

David Harold Bailey

Writer of the computer program that enabled the discovery of the Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula for computing digits of pi, Bailey is a mathematician and computer scientist. He received his B.S. degree in Mathematics...

Harry Max Markowitz

Co-developer of SIMSCRIPT, the first simulation programming language, Markowitz also received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1990 while a professor of finance at Baruch College of the City University...