Frederick (Fred) Jacob Damerau

Pioneer in natural language processing and data mining, Damerau spent over four decades at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York. Born in Parma, Ohio, son of the...

Percy Edwin Ludgate

Designer of an Analytical Engine, Ludgate helped advance calculators by expanding Charles Babbage's design for the first programmable computer. An Irish accountant working alone in Dublin, he was unaware of Charles Babbage's...

W. (Rick) Richards Adrion

Founder of the Applied Computing Systems Institute of Massachusetts, Adrion has served as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He served as PI for an NSF REU Site,...

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...

Martin (Marty) Cooper

Lead inventor of the "radio telephone system" and father of the cell phone, Cooper is a pioneer and visionary in the wireless communications industry. With eleven patents in the field, he is...

Brian Warboys

Chief designer of ICL's VME operating system, Warboys went on to become a Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Manchester from 1985 until he retired in September 2007, subsequently being...

Heinz G. Schwaertzel

Head of Central Research at Siemens AG in Munich, Schwaertzel has served as President of Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) from 1987–1991. He initiated DFKI (German Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence) in Saarbrücken...

Sidney (Sid) K. Meier

Founder of Firaxis Games and creator of "Civilization," Meier has made landmark contributions to the video game industry. In 1982, along with Bill Stealy, he co-founded MicroProse, where the "Civilization" franchise first...

Gary Mokotoff

Pioneer of the computer software industry for the IBM 1401, Mokotoff is the co-creator of the 1401 Autocoder and sole author of SPS1 and SPS2. He joined IBM in 1959. From 1959 to...

Ramon Verea

Inventor of the first calculating machine to use direct multiplication instead of employing multiple rounds of a crank, Verea was a Spanish inventor who studied in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and emigrated...

Paolo A. Gargini

Developer of the building blocks of HMOS III and CHMOS III technologies used in the 1980s for the 80286 and the 80386 processors, Gargini has served as Director of Technology Strategy and...

Kenneth (Ken) H. Perlin

Developer of Perlin noise and innovative computer-user interfaces such as zooming user interfaces, Perlin is one of the most respected figures in the field of computer graphics for his work both in...

Jack J. Dongarra

Co-developer of the LINPACK and LAPACK libraries, which have provided the benchmark for the world's 500 fastest computers since 1993, Dongarra has served as a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in...

Charles Galton Darwin

Known for assisting Henry Moseley on X-ray diffraction, Darwin was an English physicist and the grandson of Charles Darwin who also served as Director of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) during the...

Paul Alexander Desmond DeMaine

A leading figure in the early development of computer-based automatic indexing and information retrieval and one of the founders of academic computer science in the 1960s, DeMaine was born in South Africa...

Charles Sanders Peirce

As early as 1886, Peirce saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, the same idea that was used decades later to produce digital computers. An American philosopher,...

Thomas Parke Hughes

Co-founder of the Society for the History of Technology, Hughes was an American historian of technology and an emeritus Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a visiting...

Nikola Tesla

A major contributor to the birth of commercial electricity and revolutionary developer in the field of electromagnetism, Tesla was an inventor, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer who is best known for his...

Hasso Plattner

Founder of SAP, Plattner developed R/3, the landmark enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that became a cornerstone of modern business computing. He led SAP to become the world leader in application software,...

Edward Nash Yourdon

Pioneer of structured analysis and object-oriented design methodologies, Yourdon was known as one of the lead developers of the structured analysis techniques of the 1970s, as co-developer of the Yourdon/Whitehead method for...