Jagadish Chandra Bose

Named by IEEE as one of the fathers of radio science, Bose pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics, made very significant contributions to plant science, and laid the foundations of...

Curt Herzstark

Designer and manufacturer of the Curta, one of the first mechanical pocket calculators, Herzstark was an Austrian engineer and inventor. Born in Vienna, the son of Marie and Samuel Jakob Herzstark, his...

Leopold Kronecker

A contributor to the concept of continuity and the reconstruction of irrational numbers in real numbers, Kronecker was a German mathematician who worked on number theory and algebra. He was born in...

Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen

Famous for constructing The Turk, a chess-playing automaton later revealed to be a hoax, Kempelen was also a Hungarian author and inventor with Irish ancestors, born in Pressburg, Kingdom of Hungary, Habsburg...

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,...

Harold Locke Hazen

Pioneer in the development of differential analyzers, Hazen collaborated with Vannevar Bush at MIT to construct the first widely practical such machine, built 1928–1931 and comprising six mechanical integrators. In the same year,...

Lee de Forest

Inventor of the audion triode and audio and radio pioneer, De Forest had an interest in wireless telegraphy and invented the Audion in 1906. He then developed an improved wireless telegraph receiver....

Enrico Fermi

Inventor of the FERMIAC, an analog computer that used the Monte Carlo Method to study neutron transport through fissionable materials, Fermi was an Italian-born, naturalized American physicist particularly known for his work...

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.

Isidor Isaac Rabi

Co-founder of CERN and Nobel laureate in Physics, Rabi was a Galician-born American physicist born into a traditional Jewish family in Rymanów, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Poland), and was brought to the United...

Carl Georg Lange Barth

Improver and popularizer of the industrial use of compound slide rules in scientific management, Barth was a Norwegian-American mathematician and mechanical engineer. He was born in Christiania, Norway, and graduated from the...

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...

Joseph (J. J.) John Thomson

Discoverer of the electron and isotopes, and inventor of the mass spectrometer, Thomson was a British physicist and Nobel laureate born in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England. His early education took place in...

Alexander Bain

Inventor of the electric clock and pioneer of the telegraph, Bain transformed early communications technology. His first patent was dated January 11, 1841, and was in the names of John Barwise, chronometer...

Rudolf Hell

Inventor of the Hellschreiber, an early forerunner to the fax machine, Hell was a German engineer born in Eggmühl, Germany, who studied electrical engineering in Munich from 1919 to 1923. While there...

Gordon Stanley Brown

Involved in the development of Whirlwind, the first all-digital computer, Brown also originated many of the concepts behind automatic-feedback control systems and the numerical control of machine tools. He was born in...

John Vincent Atanasoff

Inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer, Atanasoff was raised by his parents in Brewster, Florida. At the age of nine he learned to use a slide rule, followed shortly by...

John William Mauchly

Co-inventor of ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic digital computer, Mauchly worked alongside J. Presper Eckert to design EDVAC, BINAC, and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States....

Samuel Finley Breese Morse

Co-inventor of Morse code and contributor to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system, Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts. After attending Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he went on to Yale...

John Napier

Renowned as the discoverer of the logarithm and inventor of "Napier's bones," Napier was a Scottish mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and astrologer, and also the 8th Laird of Merchiston. He was the son...