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.

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...

Terry Allen Winograd

Developer of SHRDLU, an early natural language understanding computer program, Winograd is known within the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence fields for his work on natural language. He wrote SHRDLU as...

Gregg M. Townsend

Implementer of noteworthy aspects of the Icon runtime system and developer of the Arizona webcam, Townsend worked at the University of Arizona for a total of 36 years, retiring in 2009, but...

George H. Conrades

Establisher of IBM's Asia/Pacific headquarters in Tokyo, Japan — enabling the region to attain record growth in revenues and earnings — Conrades is an Internet technology pioneer and executive who spent 31...

Anatolii Alexeevitch Karatsuba

Author of the first fast computational method, Karatsuba was a Russian mathematician best known for discovering the first multiplication algorithm that runs in less than O(n²) time—specifically his algorithm is O(n log2...

Elmer C. Kubie

Co-founder of Computer Usage Company (CUC), the first independent company to market computer software, Kubie helped transform how software was developed and sold. He and John W. Sheldon founded CUC (1955–1986), sometimes...

Valerie Landau

Developer of a multi-touch interface for chorded text entry, Landau filed two patents with her colleague and mentor Douglas Engelbart. Their most recent patent (filed April 2010) describes a multitouch interface for...

Peter Andreas Thiel

Co-founder of PayPal, Thiel is a German-born American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager. He co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin, and later, Elon Musk, and has served as its CEO. He...

Yogen Dalal

Member of the original Star and Ethernet development teams at Xerox, Dalal is also a co-author of the TCP Specification, whose team's pioneering work on the design of the TCP protocol has...

Bertrand Meyer

Creator of the Eiffel programming language, Meyer has made foundational contributions to software engineering and object-oriented design. He received the equivalent of a bachelor's degree in engineering from the École polytechnique in...

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....

Paul Armer

President of AFIPS and longtime RAND computer scientist, Armer studied chemistry at Loyola University in Los Angeles. His college career was interrupted by the armed services, where he worked in meteorology. After...

William (Bill) Reeves

Pioneer and inventor of the first Motion Blur algorithm and methods to simulate particle motion in computer graphics, Reeves is also one of the founding employees of Pixar. After obtaining a Bachelor...

Lawrence J. Shoenberg

Noted for serving as head of three sections of ADAPSO—Software Products, Professional Services, and Information Systems Integration—Shoenberg also spent 20 years on the ADAPSO board and served a term as its chair....

Fei-Fei Li

Best known for establishing ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s, Li is a professor of computer science at Stanford University whose research spans artificial intelligence,...

Alan Kotok

Co-developer of what is sometimes called the first video game (Spacewar!), Kotok was also part of the team that wrote the Kotok-McCarthy program which took part in the first chess match between...

Jeffrey Chuan Chu

A core member of the engineering team that designed the first electronic computer, ENIAC, in 1946, Chu went on to become a leading figure in computing and a tireless advocate for modernizing...

Luba Cherbakov

Co-inventor and chief evangelist behind Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA), the industry's first SOA modeling method, Cherbakov is also a 2012 IBM Fellow — the 13th woman (and among only seventeen women)...

Chad Meredith Hurley

Co-founder and former CEO of the popular video sharing website YouTube, Hurley is also known for co-founding MixBit. In June 2006, he was voted 28th on Business 2.0's "50 People Who Matter...