Bailey Whitfield Diffie

Pioneer of public-key cryptography, Diffie co-authored the landmark 1976 paper "New Directions in Cryptography," which introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, going far toward solving one of the fundamental...

L.J. Sevin

A significant leader in the founding and growth of the U.S. high tech industry, Sevin co-founded Mostek Corporation in 1969 and later co-founded the venture capital firm Sevin Rosen Funds (SRF) with...

Morris Chang

Founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Chang is sometimes called the father of Taiwan's chip industry. TSMC pioneered the "dedicated silicon foundry" industry and became the largest silicon foundry in the...

David F. Marquardt

Co-founder of August Capital in 1995, Marquardt has served on more than 25 boards of directors during his venture capital career, including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle), Seagate, Adaptec, and Grand...

Charles (Chuck) H. Moore

Inventor of the Forth programming language, Moore is recognized as one of the most influential figures in programming language history. Born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, in 1938, Moore grew up in Flint,...

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...

Marc Andreessen

Founder of Netscape and co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He also chaired Opsware, a software company he originally founded as...

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...

Frances (Fran) Elizabeth Allen

Pioneer in optimizing compilers and the first woman to win the Turing Award, Allen was also the first female IBM Fellow. Allen was an expert in the field of optimizing compilers. As a...

James T. Russell

Inventor of the concept of optical digital recording and playback, Russell joined the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of Battelle Memorial Institute in Richland in 1965. There, that same year, he developed the...

Sonja Bernhardt

Founder and Inaugural President of Women in Technology (WiT) in Queensland in 1997, Bernhardt was a prominent Australian figure in efforts to bring more women and girls into technology careers. She also...

James A. Gosling

Credited as the inventor of the Java programming language, Gosling is best known as the father of Java.

Gordon B. Davis

Founding father of the academic discipline of MIS, Davis established research and teaching in MIS at the University of Minnesota in 1967. Davis authored and co-authored foundation texts in the discipline. He...

Yoky Matsuoka

A 2007 MacArthur Fellow, Matsuoka founded Yohana, an independent subsidiary of Panasonic, and co-founded Google X. Her research at the University of Washington combined neuroscience and robotics, a field she termed neurobotics,...

Leslie Berlin

Author and noted IT historian, Berlin has served as Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. She wrote *The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of...

John Edward Hopcroft

Recognized for fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures, Hopcroft is an American theoretical computer scientist. His textbooks on theory of computation (also known as the Cinderella...

Samuel (Sam) H. Altman

President of Y Combinator and co-chairman of OpenAI, Altman is an American entrepreneur, programmer, and blogger.

Lester (Les) Donald Earnest

Developer of the "first pen-based computer system that reliably recognized cursive writing" and the first spell checker, Earnest began his career as a computer programmer in 1954 during a stint as a...

Gerrit (Gerry) Anne Blaauw

One of the principal designers of the IBM System/360 line of computers, Blaauw worked alongside Fred Brooks, Gene Amdahl, and others on this landmark project. In 1947, he won an exclusive scholarship funded...

Seymour Ivan Rubinstein

Director of the development of WordStar — the first truly successful commercial program for the personal computer — Rubinstein gave the general population reasonably priced access to word processing for the first...