Ken Thompson

Co-creator of the UNIX operating system, Thompson is an American pioneer of computer science notable for his work with the B programming language and his shepherding of the Unix and Plan 9...

Richard (Dick) Manning Karp

Co-publisher with John Hopcroft of the Hopcroft–Karp algorithm, still the fastest known method for finding maximum cardinality matchings in bipartite graphs, Karp is a computer scientist and computational theorist at the University...

Monty M. Denneau

Pioneer in high-performance computer design, Denneau received the 2002 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award for "ingenious and sustained contributions to designs and implementations at the frontier of high performance computing leading to...

Bernard Meyerson

Founder and developer of IBM's highly successful Analog and Mixed Signal business, Meyerson has served across a series of science, engineering, and business leadership roles throughout his career at IBM. Born in New...

Tamiko Thiel

Visual designer of the Thinking Machines Corp. Connection Machine (CM-1, CM-2), Thiel holds a B.S. from Stanford in general engineering/product design and also an M.S. from MIT in mechanical engineering. She has also...

Cordell Green

Founder of the Kestrel Institute and known for his research in knowledge-based software engineering, Green has served as Director and Chief Scientist of Kestrel Institute, which he founded in 1981. He was...

Daniel A. Hitchcock

Leader of the effort to expand the Magnetic Fusion Energy Computing Center into NERSC, widely regarded as the best-managed High Performance Computing Center in the world, Hitchcock joined the Department of Energy...

Donald Valentine

Referred to as the "grandfather of Silicon Valley venture capital," Valentine was an American venture capitalist who concentrated mainly on technology companies in the United States. Valentine grew up in the Bronx,...

Fernando (Corby) J. Corbato

Pioneer in the development of general-purpose, large-scale, time-sharing and resource-sharing computer systems, Corbató received the ACM Turing Award in 1990 for these foundational contributions. Fernando (Corby) J. Corbató was born on July 1,...

Peter Karmanos, Jr.

Co-founder of Compuware, a worldwide leader in software technology, Karmanos launched the company in 1973 with two partners, Thomas Thewes and Allen Cutting. Born into a Greek immigrant family, he graduated from...

Susan Estrada

Founder of CERFnet, one of the original regional IP networks, Estrada is recognized as an Internet pioneer and named a "thinking nerd" by colleagues, with a deep interest in emerging broadband technologies...

Karl Ganzhorn

Director of IBM development in Europe, Ganzhorn founded and led the German laboratory of IBM at Böblingen. He initiated major development efforts in semiconductor memories, computer systems, and software. Ganzhorn has served as...

Edwin (Ted) Joseph Selker

Developer of the TrackPoint pointing stick technology and designer of the ThinkPad 755CV notebook computer (which doubles as an LCD projector), Selker is an American computer scientist known for his user interface...

Robert (Bob) Melancton Metcalfe

Bob Metcalfe is most famous for his co-invention of the Ethernet in the 1970s as Xerox. He also made the statement that the value of a network is roughly proportional to the...

Shoichiro Yoshida

Co-developer of advanced steppers and scanners, high-precision instruments used in the complex process of making integrated circuits, Yoshida has been a pivotal figure in IC lithography innovation. A Japanese engineer born in...

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...

Harry M. Yudenfriend

Developer of a roadmap enabling consistent data growth, performance improvements, enhanced resilience, continuous availability, increased scale, and improved efficiency at IBM, Yudenfriend was named an IBM Fellow in 2008 and has served...

Robert (Bob) C. Baron

Program Manager for the Mariner II (Venus) and the Mariner IV (Mars) onboard space computers, Baron spent over 25 years as an engineer, entrepreneur, and executive in the computer industry. A historian,...

Andrew James Viterbi

Inventor of the Viterbi algorithm, used for decoding convolutionally encoded data and still widely used in cellular phones for error correcting codes, as well as for speech recognition, DNA analysis, and many...

Robert Endre Tarjan

Renowned for fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures, Tarjan is an American computer scientist. He discovered several important graph algorithms, including Tarjan's off-line least common ancestors...