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...

László Kalmár

Pioneer in mathematical logic and theoretical computer science, Kalmár defined what are known as elementary functions, number-theoretic functions (i.e. those based on the natural numbers) built up from the notions of composition...

Juris Hartmanis

Co-author of the seminal paper that established the foundations for computational complexity theory, Hartmanis received the 1993 ACM Turing Award with Richard E. Stearns "in recognition of their seminal paper which established...

Mina Spiegel Rees

Pioneer of federally funded computer research and development and the first woman president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Rees transformed the landscape of postwar American science. She was...

Lorinda Cherry

A longtime member of the original Unix Lab at Bell Labs, Cherry devoted much of her career to developing mathematical tools and utilities for text formatting and analysis, and influenced the creation...

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...

Klaus Samelson

A pioneer whose research led to a fundamental breakthrough in how computer systems are modeled and designed, Samelson also played a key role in the design of ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60....

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...

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...

Neil James Alexander Sloane

Contributor to the fields of combinatorics, error-correction coding, and sphere packing, Sloane's research has ranged far and wide, including coding theory, sphere packing, lattices and quadratic forms, packing lines, and planes, spherical...

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...

Oswald Veblen

Involved in overseeing the World War II work that produced the pioneering ENIAC electronic digital computer, Veblen was also an American mathematician, geometer, and topologist whose work found application in atomic physics...

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...

Alain Glavieux

Co-inventor of turbo codes, Glavieux was a French professor of electrical engineering at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications de Bretagne. He was the coinventor with Claude Berrou and Punya Thitimajshima of a...

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,...

John Richard Rice

Founder of the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, Rice was an American mathematician and computer scientist who served as the W. Brooks Fortune Distinguished Emeritus of Computer Science and a Professor of...

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...

David R. Karger

Developer of the fastest minimum spanning tree algorithm to date, Karger is also known for Karger's algorithm, a Monte Carlo method to compute the minimum cut of a connected graph. His work...

Antonin Svoboda

Czech computer scientist and creator of fault-tolerant computer design, Svoboda was one of the most influential scientists in the 20th century. He was born in Prague in 1907. Attending a series of...

James William Cooley

Co-developer of the Fast Fourier Transform, Cooley made one of the most significant contributions to mathematics and digital signal processing in the twentieth century. Cooley was born and raised in New York City....