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...

Mitchell Jay Feigenbaum

Developer of groundbreaking techniques in cartography and co-founder of Numerix, Feigenbaum was also a mathematical physicist whose pioneering studies in chaos theory led to the discovery of the Feigenbaum constants. He was...

Marian Adam Rejewski

Solver of the plugboard-equipped Enigma machine, the main cipher device used by Germany, Rejewski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who accomplished this feat in 1932. His success, along with his colleagues...

Bailey Whitfield Diffie

Pioneer of public-key cryptography, Diffie co-authored the landmark 1976 paper "New Directions in Cryptography," which introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, going far toward solving one of the fundamental...

René Descartes

Credited as the father of analytical geometry, Descartes built the bridge between algebra and geometry that proved crucial to the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. The Cartesian coordinate system—allowing algebraic equations...

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...

Dimitri P. Bertsekas

Known for his fourteen textbooks and monographs in theoretical and algorithmic optimization and control, and in applied probability, Bertsekas is an applied mathematician and computer scientist who has served as a professor...

Friedrich Ludwig Bauer

First to propose the widely used stack method of expression evaluation, Bauer patented the pushdown stack in 1957, a contribution that proved foundational to modern computing. He contributed to the definition of...

Jack J. Dongarra

Co-developer of the LINPACK and LAPACK libraries, which have provided the benchmark for the world's 500 fastest computers since 1993, Dongarra has served as a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in...

Charles Sanders Peirce

As early as 1886, Peirce saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, the same idea that was used decades later to produce digital computers. An American philosopher,...

Howard Frank

Conductor of the original topological analysis for the ARPAnet, Frank evaluated the network's performance and reliability and studied how the technology could be applied to the larger world. Having earned his Ph.D....

Henry (Hank) Wallman

Co-builder of the Electronic Differential Analyser, an early example of an analog computer, Wallman also performed pioneering research in biomedical engineering combining video displays with X-ray imaging. An American mathematician known for...

Eva Tardos

Recipient of the Fulkerson Prize (1988), the Dantzig Prize (2006), and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2019), Tardos is known as a Hungarian mathematician and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of...

Lydia E. Kavraki

Known for research in robotics, bioinformatics, and algorithms, Kavraki left Greece to pursue a PhD in computer science at Stanford University. Drawn to the human potential of robotics, Kavraki studied how robots—from...

Ronald (Ron) Fagin

Pioneer in database theory and finite model theory, Fagin is an American computer scientist and IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center, best known for introducing the Fourth Normal Form and...

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,...

Richard Wesley Hamming

Known for his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes, Hamming was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer science and telecommunications. Hamming's contributions...

Ralph Edward Gomory

Credited with many fundamental contributions to advanced technology — including the single-transistor memory cell, high-density storage devices, silicon processing methods, and relational database theory — Gomory is an American applied mathematician and...

Mark Semenovich Pinsker

Known for his entropy theory of dynamical systems, which introduced the maximal partition with zero entropy, later known as Pinsker's partition, Pinsker studied stochastic processes under A. N. Kolmogorov in the 1950s,...

William Stanley Jevons

Constructed a logical machine called the Logic Piano, Jevons was a pioneering figure in both logic and economics. Jevons arrived quite early in his career at the doctrines that constituted his most...