Léon Bollée

Inventor of the first calculating machine, Bollée began work in 1887 on three calculating machines: the Direct Multiplier, the Calculating Board, and the Arithmographe. Bollée's Multiplier was the second successful direct-multiplying calculator...

Conrad (Conny) Palm

Contributor to teletraffic engineering and queueing theory, Palm also led the project that developed the first Swedish computer, the BARK. He enrolled at the School of Electrical Engineering at the Royal Institute...

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...

Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci

Among those who designed a calculator, da Vinci stands as one of history's most remarkable minds — an Italian polymath regarded as the epitome of the "Renaissance Man", displaying skills in numerous...

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...

Giovanni Poleni

Builder of the first pinwheel design calculating clock, Poleni was a pioneer of mechanical computation. Made of wood, his calculating clock was built in 1709; he destroyed it after hearing that Antonius...

Stephen Cole Kleene

American mathematician who helped lay the foundations for theoretical computer science, Kleene was best known as a founder of the branch of mathematical logic known as recursion theory. One of many distinguished...

Wallace John Eckert

A part of the creation of the research division of IBM, Eckert directed the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau at Columbia University, which evolved into that division.

Georg (Per) Pehr Scheutz

Co-developer of the Scheutzian calculation engine, which produced the first tables calculated and printed by machinery, Scheutz was a 19th-century Swedish lawyer, translator, and inventor. He studied law at Lund University, graduating...

Gustav Tauschek

Developer of numerous improvements for punched card-based calculating machines, Tauschek was an Austrian pioneer of information technology who worked in this field from 1922 to 1945. During the years 1926–1930 he worked...

Konrad Zuse

German engineer who, completely independently of British and American computing efforts, built the Z3 (1941), the first working program-controlled general-purpose digital computer. The Z3, destroyed in the bombing of Berlin, never got...

Johannes Kepler

Best known for his eponymous laws of planetary motion, Kepler was a German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer and a key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution. His laws were codified by...

Clair D. Lake

Co-inventor of IBM's MARK I and co-developer of the first Type 1 Total Printing and Listing Tabulator, Lake was a prolific IBM inventor. In May 1939 he was assigned to serve as...

Arthur Scherbius

Inventor of the cryptographic machine Enigma, Scherbius founded the company to manufacture it and transformed the history of wartime communications. He was born in Frankfurt am Main and studied electricity at the...

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...

Allan Marquand

Builder of a mechanical logical machine that is still extant, Marquand is described as having created "…mills into which the premises are fed and which turn out the conclusions by the revolution...

Philibert Maurice d'Ocagne

Pioneer of nomography — the systematization of graphical calculation methods using nomograms — d'Ocagne was a French engineer and mathematician whose scientific personality soon fell into oblivion, leaving only a few milestones...

Martin Wiberg

Inventor of a machine that could print logarithmic tables, Wiberg is known as a computer pioneer for his 1875 invention of a device the size of a sewing machine. The tables were...

Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet

Considered one of the fathers of information science, Otlet was an author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer, and peace activist whose writings have sometimes been called prescient of the current World Wide Web. He...

Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope

Inventor of two calculating machines, Stanhope was also a British statesman and scientist and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). Also known as Charles Mahon, 3rd Earl Stanhope, he was the...