Wilhelm Schickard

Inventor of many machines, including one for calculating astronomical dates and one for Hebrew grammar, Schickard was a universal scientist whose research spanned astronomy, mathematics, and surveying. He taught biblical languages such as...

David Gelernter

Made seminal contributions to the field of parallel computation, specifically the tuple space coordination model as embodied by the Linda programming system (named for Linda Lovelace, an actress in the porn movie...

John LeRoy Hennessy

Co-founder of MIPS Computer Systems Inc., Hennessy is known for developing the MIPS architecture and pioneering RISC chips. He has also served as the 10th President of Stanford University. He earned his...

Jack Yun Ma

Founder of one of the world's biggest B2B online marketplaces, Ma built Alibaba.com into an eBay for companies doing international trade. A Chinese entrepreneur and philanthropist, he also founded and served as...

Regina Honu

Founder of Soronko Academy, the first coding and human-centered design school for children and young adults in West Africa, Honu was a Ghanaian social entrepreneur and software developer who also established Soronko...

Lydia E. Kavraki

Known for research in robotics, bioinformatics, and algorithms, Kavraki left Greece to pursue a PhD in computer science at Stanford University. Drawn to the human potential of robotics, Kavraki studied how robots—from...

Albert S. Hoagland

Early designer of random access disk storage, Hoagland played a key role in magnetic head design and recording for the Random Access Method of Accounting and Control (RAMAC) disk drive, the first...

Biz Stone

Co-founder of Twitter, Stone also served as its Creative Director and helped to create and launch Xanga, Blogger, Odeo, and Obvious. Stone published two books about blogging, including *Blogging: Genius Strategies for...

Ling Liu

Head of the Distributed Data Intensive Systems Lab (DiSL) research group at Georgia Institute of Technology, Liu is known for producing a number of open-source software systems, including WebCQ, XWRAPElite, PeerCrawl, GTMobSIM,...

Severo M. Ornstein

Co-designer of Mockingbird, the first interactive computer-based music-score editor, and overseer of its programming, Ornstein is a retired computer scientist and son of Russian-American composer Leo Ornstein. He joined MIT's Lincoln Laboratory...

Albert W. Tucker

Developer of the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions, a basic result in non-linear programming, Tucker was a Canadian-born American mathematician who also made important contributions in topology and game theory. Born in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada,...

Jean David Ichbiah

Chief designer of the Ada programming language, Ichbiah was a French-born computer scientist who led the design of Ada (from 1977–1983), a general-purpose, strongly typed programming language with certified validated compilers. At...

Daniel E. Cooke

Inventor of the SequenceL functional programming language, Cooke discovered the computational laws that led to its creation and implemented several early interpreters for the language. During his tenure at Texas Tech University,...

Muhammad ibn Musa al

Presenter of the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations in Arabic, al-Khwārizmī was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and geographer—a scholar in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad whose life spanned...

Werner L. Frank

Co-founder of Informatics General Corporation, one of the first viable software companies, Frank is a pioneering figure and longtime contributor to the United States and international computer industry. Born in the small...

Isaac L Auerbach

Founder of Auerbach Associates and publisher of the influential Auerbach Reports on computer issues, Auerbach was a leading figure in the information processing industry. Isaac Auerbach earned a BS at Drexel University in...

Jay N. Goldberg

Purchaser of Money Management Systems, Inc. (MMS) in 1986, Goldberg acquired the firm — which sold software and services to banks and broker-dealers for securities trading activities — from Ziff-Davis, later selling...

Ding-Yuan (DY) Yang

Led Winbond Electronics Corporation to emerge as one of the Asian IC industry's top innovators into the mid-1990s, Yang has been a central figure in Taiwan's semiconductor development. One of the founding...

Satya Nadella

Leader of a transformation of Microsoft's business and technology culture from client services to cloud infrastructure and services, Nadella was appointed CEO of Microsoft Corporation on February 4, 2014, succeeding Steve Ballmer,...

Robert (Bob) P. Colwell

Leader of the development of Intel's Pentium 4 CPU, Colwell is also recognized as the chief IA-32 architect on the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and Pentium III microprocessors. An electrical engineer and...