Blaise Pascal

Inventor of the Pascaline, a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction, Pascal built twenty of these machines over the following ten years after constructing the first in 1642 following three years...

Manuel Blum

Recipient of the 1995 Turing Award for his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking, Blum is a computer scientist whose work has...

Emil Leon Post

Best known for his work in the field that eventually became known as computability theory, Post made foundational contributions to mathematical logic and the theory of computation. In his doctoral thesis, Post proved,...

Mary Lee Woods (aka Berners-Lee)

Member of the team that developed programs for the Manchester University Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1 and Mark 1 Star computers, Woods was a British mathematician and computer programmer who was married...

Solomon Lefschetz

Developer of the Lefschetz fixed point theorem, now a basic result of topology, Lefschetz did fundamental work on algebraic topology, its applications to algebraic geometry, and the theory of non-linear ordinary differential...

Robert Clay Prim

Co-developer of Prim's algorithm for finding a minimum spanning tree in a weighted graph, Prim made foundational contributions to computer network design. An American mathematician and computer scientist, he was born in...

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...

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,...

Charles Eric Leiserson

Inventor of the fat-tree interconnection network, a hardware-universal interconnection network used in many supercomputers, Leiserson is also a pioneer developer of VLSI theory. He designed the fat-tree for the Connection Machine CM5,...

Robin Oliver Gandy

A pioneer in recursion theory, Gandy is best known for the Spector-Gandy theorem, the Gandy Stage Comparison theorem, and the Gandy Selection Theorem. A British mathematician and logician, he was a friend,...

Adi Shamir

Co-inventor of the RSA public-key cryptosystem, Shamir is an Israeli cryptographer whose initial in "RSA" stands for his name. He is also one of the inventors of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme. His...

Stanisław Marcin Ulam

Originator of the concept of the technological singularity, Ulam was also a renowned mathematician of Polish-Jewish origin who participated in America's Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons, suggested the...

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...

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace

Known as the "World's First Computer Programmer," Lovelace wrote notes on Charles Babbage's analytical engine that include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine. An...

Nils Aall Barricelli

Pioneering in artificial life research, Barricelli conducted early computer-assisted experiments in symbiogenesis and evolution that are considered foundational to the field. Being independently wealthy, he held an unpaid residency at the Institute...

Patrick Carl Fischer

His work on the mathematical foundations of database query languages became central to the databases now used by major web servers worldwide. Fischer was an American computer scientist and noted researcher in...

Harry Lewis Nelson

Co-discoverer of the 27th Mersenne prime in 1979, which was at that time the largest known prime number, Nelson is also recognized as one of the world's foremost experts in writing optimized...

Victor Shoup

Co-developer of the Cramer–Shoup cryptosystem, the first efficient asymmetric encryption scheme proven to be secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack using standard cryptographic assumptions, Shoup is a computer scientist and mathematician. He...

Alan Mathison Turing

The mathematical logician Alan Mathison Turing OBE (1912-1954) contributed to logic, mathematics, cryptanalysis, philosophy, mathematical biology, and formatively to computer science, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive science, and the computational study of biological growth. Turing...

Leopold Kronecker

A contributor to the concept of continuity and the reconstruction of irrational numbers in real numbers, Kronecker was a German mathematician who worked on number theory and algebra. He was born in...