Robert Mano Fano

Known principally for his work in information theory and the invention of Shannon-Fano coding, Fano was a computer scientist and professor emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of...

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...

Stephen Warshall

Developer of the transitive closure algorithm known as Warshall's algorithm, Warshall made foundational contributions to graph analysis for finding shortest paths in a weighted graph. Born in New York City, Warshall went to...

Ethel Cox Marden

Participant in the creation of the first computer languages, Marden went to work for the National Bureau of Standards after World War II, serving as a mathematician and administrator. She served as...

Michael Oser Rabin

Author of the landmark joint paper "Finite Automata and Their Decision Problems," which introduced nondeterministic machines and had a lasting impact on automata theory, Rabin and co-author Dana S. Scott were cited...

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...

Gene Howard Golub

Co-publisher of an algorithm with William Kahan in 1970 that made the computation of the singular value decomposition (SVD) feasible and that is still used today, Golub was one of the preeminent...

Cordell Green

Founder of the Kestrel Institute and known for his research in knowledge-based software engineering, Green has served as Director and Chief Scientist of Kestrel Institute, which he founded in 1981. He was...

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...

Dorothy Vaughan

The first African American woman to receive a promotion and supervise a group of staff at Langley Research Center, Vaughan became acting supervisor of the West Area Computers in 1949 and was...

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...

John George Kemeny

Co-developer of the BASIC programming language, Kemeny transformed computing by making it accessible to ordinary people. Kemeny entered Princeton University, where he studied mathematics and philosophy, but he took a year off during...

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...

Solomon Wolf Golomb

Inventor of Golomb coding and pioneer in combinatorial analysis and coding theory, Golomb transformed modern communications. He pioneered the identification of the characteristics and merits of maximum length shift register sequences, also...

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...

Peter A. Franaszek

Known for his research in fragmentation-reduction algorithms, network theory, and magnetic recording, Franaszek has been a researcher at the IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York. Dr....

Richard (Dick) Mandelbaum

Co-founder of NYSERNet, the first nongovernment Internet service provider (ISP), Mandelbaum started out as a Theoretical Mathematician and became a Professor of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering. He has also served...

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...

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...

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...