William Seward Burroughs

Inventor of the adding machine, Burroughs was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. An American inventor, born in Rochester, New York, the son of a mechanic, he worked with...

Randy Howard Katz

Co-developer of the redundant array of independent disks (RAID) concept for computer storage, Katz is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department....

Ben Forta

Author of numerous technical books on ColdFusion, SQL, and Regular Expressions, Forta has also served as Senior Technical Evangelist for Adobe Systems, particularly ColdFusion and Flex, and has been the owner of...

Misha Mahowald

Inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1996, Mahowald was recognized for her development of the Silicon Eye and other computational systems. A pioneer in the emerging field...

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...

James Waddell Alexander II

Founder of cohomology theory, Alexander was also a pioneer in algebraic topology who contributed to the beginnings of knot theory by defining the first of the polynomial knot invariants. He was an American...

Alan Emtage

Alan Emtage conceived and implemented the first version of Archie, a pre-Web internet search engine for locating material in public FTP archives.

Daniel C. Edelstein

Leading expert in copper chip wiring technologies, Edelstein served as Chief Architect and driving force behind IBM's copper chip wiring technologies, first announced in 1997. These were devised to increase the speed...

Derrick (Dick) Henry Lehmer

Part of the Computations Committee formed to prepare the ENIAC for utilization following its completion, Lehmer was also active in the building of the California Digital Computer (CALDIC). An American mathematician, he...

Lois Haibt

The only female member of the ten-person team that invented FORTRAN, Haibt is an American computer scientist perhaps most famous for her role in creating the first successful high-level programming language. She...

Joseph Hardin

Leader of the Comprehensive Collaborative Framework (CHEF) project, which developed an open source framework and tools for course management systems, workgroup support, and support of online research, Hardin has served as Director...

Marvin L. Stein

One of the founding faculty members of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota, Stein served as its Director from 1958 to 1970. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he entered...

Ronald (Ron) Lewis Graham

Credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years," Graham was also a leading figure in scheduling theory,...

Allessandro Volta

Inventor of the battery in 1800 and a remotely operated pistol that was a significant forerunner of the telegraph, Volta transformed the understanding of electricity. He was born in Como, Italy, and taught...

Peter R. Jennings

Author of the first commercially successful chess program for microcomputers, Jennings is a Canadian physicist, interdisciplinary scientist, inventor, software developer, computer chess programmer, businessman, and paraglider. Born in England, his family moved...

Jeffrey R Yost

Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Yost has also served as Associate Director of the Charles Babbage Institute from 1998 onward. Yost authored The Computer Industry (Greenwood Press, 2005) and...

Jonathan Bruce Postel

A significant contributor to the development of the Internet, Postel was involved in early work on the ARPANET while at UCLA. He later moved to the Information Sciences Institute at the University...

Charles Leonard Hamblin

Inventor of Reverse Polish Notation and the stack in computing, Hamblin was an Australian philosopher, logician, and computer pioneer. He served as a professor of philosophy at the Technical University of New...

Marc Russell Benioff

Founder and CEO of Salesforce.com, Benioff is credited with "turning the software industry on its head" by using the Internet to "revamp the way software programs are designed and distributed." He has...

William (Bill) Douglas Gropp

Co-creator of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc), Gropp has served as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, holding...