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...

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...

Frederick Jelinek

Pioneer of speech recognition, Jelinek was a Czech-American researcher in information theory, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing, well known for his oft-quoted statement, "Every time I fire a linguist, the...

Robert Endre Tarjan

Renowned for fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures, Tarjan is an American computer scientist. He discovered several important graph algorithms, including Tarjan's off-line least common ancestors...

Irene Greif

Inventor of the Version Manager — consistently designated by analysts as the most significant group-enabling feature in spreadsheets — Greif is an American computer scientist and a founder of the field of...

Vladimir Iosifovich Levenshtein

Best known for his contributions to error-correction theory and information theory, Levenshtein is sometimes called the father of edit distance and is known for the Levenshtein distance algorithm, which he developed in...

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...

John (Jack) G. Herriot

Teacher of the first programming course at Stanford University, Herriot helped found the Computer Science Department and served as the first Director of the Stanford Computation Center, which later evolved to become...

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....

Clifford (Cliff) B. Jones

Team member on the Vienna Development Method (VDM) at IBM in Vienna, Jones is a British computer scientist known for his work on one of the longest-established formal methods for the development...

Stephen Robertson

Contributor to the Microsoft search engine Bing, Robertson is a British computer scientist well known for his work on information retrieval. After completing his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Cambridge University, he...

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...

Carl Adam Petri

Developer of Petri nets for modeling distributed systems, Petri introduced the concept in his Ph.D. thesis in 1962, where he originally called them communicating automata. Afterwards, Petri served as department head at...

Lubomir Georgiev Iliev

Pioneer of computing in Bulgaria and of abstract mathematics, Iliev was born in Samokov. He graduated from Sofia University in 1908, became a professor in 1925, and earned a PhD in Mathematical...

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...

Derrick (Dick) Henry Lehmer

Part of the Computations Committee formed to prepare the ENIAC for utilization following its completion, Lehmer was also active in the building of the California Digital Computer (CALDIC). An American mathematician, he...

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...

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 Hilbert

One of the founders of proof theory and mathematical logic, Hilbert's work laid the basis for recursion theory and later theoretical computer science. He was recognized as one of the most influential...

Ronald (Ron) Lewis Graham

Credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years," Graham was also a leading figure in scheduling theory,...