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...

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...

David Albert Huffman

Best known for his legendary Huffman code, a compression scheme for lossless variable length encoding, Huffman joined the faculty at MIT in 1953. He was awarded the Louis E. Levy Medal in...

Ralph C. Merkle

Co-inventor of public key cryptography, Merkle is a researcher who also works as a speaker on molecular nanotechnology and cryonics. He appeared as a character in the science fiction novel *The Diamond...

Stephen Arthur Cook

Known for profoundly advancing our understanding of the complexity of computation, Cook is an American-Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who made major contributions to the fields of complexity theory and proof complexity....

Doulgas Rayner Hartree

English mathematician and physicist, Hartree was most famous for the development of numerical analysis and its application to the Hartree-Fock equations of atomic physics and the construction of the meccano differential analyzer.

George Boole

Inventor of Boolean logic, Boole was one of the most influential mathematicians in history. His father, John Boole (1779–1848), was a tradesman of limited means, but of "studious character and active mind"....

Marvin Lee Minsky

Co-founder of MIT's AI laboratory and a towering figure in artificial intelligence, Minsky was an American cognitive scientist and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.

Jan Camenisch

Co-inventor of Identity Mixer, a unique cryptographic protocol suite for privacy-preserving authentication and transfer of certified attributes, Camenisch is a leading scientist in the area of privacy and cryptography. He has served...

Frederick (Fred) Jacob Damerau

Pioneer in natural language processing and data mining, Damerau spent over four decades at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York. Born in Parma, Ohio, son of the...

Richard (Dick) Manning Karp

Co-publisher with John Hopcroft of the Hopcroft–Karp algorithm, still the fastest known method for finding maximum cardinality matchings in bipartite graphs, Karp is a computer scientist and computational theorist at the University...

Clifford Alan Pickover

Member of the team that worked on design-automation workstations and developed code for IBM's IntelliStation, Pickover is an American author, editor, inventor, and columnist in the fields of science, mathematics, and science...

Harlan B. Mills

Pioneer in automata theory and structured programming, Mills transformed software development through his advocacy of mathematical and statistical principles in software engineering. In 1969, Mills was asked to write a program creating...

Peter Naur

Contributor to the creation of the ALGOL 60 programming language, Naur won the 2005 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his work on defining it. In particular, his role as editor of the...

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...

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,...

Joseph (Joe) Frederick Traub

Co-pioneer of information-based computational complexity, Traub was the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He held positions at Bell Laboratories,...

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...

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...

Donald Ervin Knuth

Author of the landmark series *The Art of Computer Programming*, Knuth is renowned for his contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages. He has served as Professor...