Computing
People behind computers and software.
People in Computing
95 profiles
MathematicianAda Lovelace
Recognising what a programmable machine could do beyond arithmetic.
MathematicianAlan Turing
Helping break Enigma and laying foundations for computer science.
Computer scientistGrace Hopper
Helping make computer programming readable in English-like language.
Computer scientistTim Berners-Lee
Inventing the World Wide Web.
MathematicianClaude Shannon
Establishing the mathematical foundations of digital communication.
Business executiveTim Cook
Leading Apple through the iPhone era as chief executive from 2011 to 2026.
Business executiveSundar Pichai
Leading Google and its parent company Alphabet after overseeing products including Chrome.
Business executiveSatya Nadella
Leading Microsoft’s shift toward cloud computing and subscription services.
Business executiveJensen Huang
Co-founding Nvidia and helping take graphics processors into artificial-intelligence computing.
EngineerLisa Su
Leading AMD’s revival as a major processor company.
Game designerShigeru Miyamoto
Creating Mario and The Legend of Zelda with Nintendo teams.
Computer scientistDemis Hassabis
Co-founding DeepMind and advancing protein-structure prediction with AlphaFold.
Game designerHideo Kojima
Creating Metal Gear and cinematic, unconventional video games.
Computer scientistFei-Fei Li
Leading ImageNet, a dataset that accelerated computer vision research.
Computer scientistDonald Knuth
Writing The Art of Computer Programming and creating the TeX typesetting system.
Computer scientistDennis Ritchie
Creating the C programming language and co-developing Unix.
Computer scientistKen Thompson
Creating the original Unix operating system and helping design UTF-8 and Go.
Computer scientistLinus Torvalds
Creating the Linux kernel and the Git version-control system.
Computer scientistMargaret Hamilton
Leading the team that developed onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo missions.
Computer scientistDouglas Engelbart
Inventing the computer mouse and demonstrating an early vision of interactive, collaborative computing.
Computer scientistBarbara Liskov
Helping programmers build reliable software through data abstraction, the CLU language and the Liskov substitution principle.
Computer scientistSophie Wilson
Co-designing the original ARM processor architecture and writing BBC BASIC for the BBC Micro.
Computer scientistShafi Goldwasser
Co-developing zero-knowledge proofs and mathematical foundations for modern cryptographic security.
Computer scientistYukihiro Matsumoto
Creating Ruby, the programming language designed around expressive code and programmer enjoyment.
Computer scientistRaj Reddy
Pioneering speech recognition and artificial intelligence, and founding Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute.
Computer scientistAdele Goldberg
Co-developing Smalltalk and helping bring object-oriented programming and graphical computing to a wider audience.
Computer scientistGuido van Rossum
Creating Python, the programming language known for readable code and use across science, automation and software development.
Computer scientistAdi Shamir
Co-inventing RSA public-key cryptography and developing influential methods for sharing and analysing secrets.
Computer scientistAndrew Yao
Establishing foundations of computational complexity, secure computation and communication between computers.
Computer scientistWard Cunningham
Creating the first wiki: a website its readers could edit together.
Computer scientistJean E. Sammet
Helping develop COBOL and leading the creation of FORMAC for symbolic mathematics.
Computer scientistBjarne Stroustrup
Creating C++, the programming language behind systems, games and high-performance software.
EngineerAjay Bhatt
Helping develop USB, the standard that simplified connecting devices to computers.
EntrepreneurJimmy Wales
Co-founding Wikipedia, the collaboratively written free encyclopedia.
Computer scientistGeoffrey Hinton
Helping establish deep learning and the neural networks behind modern artificial intelligence.
EntrepreneurNandan Nilekani
Co-founding Infosys and leading the launch of India’s Aadhaar identification system.
Computer scientistYoshua Bengio
Advancing deep learning and neural language models.
Computer scientistYann LeCun
The deep-learning pioneer whose convolutional neural networks helped computers recognise handwriting and images.
Computer scientistJohn McCarthy
The artificial-intelligence pioneer who coined the field’s name and developed Lisp.
Computer scientistSteve Furber
The engineer who co-designed the BBC Micro and the original ARM processor.
Computer scientistMarvin Minsky
The artificial-intelligence pioneer who co-founded MIT’s AI laboratory and wrote The Society of Mind.
Computer scientistNiklaus Wirth
Creating Pascal and influential approaches to structured programming.
Computer scientistEdsger W. Dijkstra
Developing the shortest-path algorithm and advancing structured programming.
Computer scientistHerbert A. Simon
Explaining bounded rationality and helping establish artificial intelligence research.
Computer scientistTony Hoare
Creating quicksort and foundational methods for reasoning about programs.
Computer scientistFrances Allen
Developing ways for compilers to make computer programs run more efficiently.
Computer scientistEdgar F. Codd
Creating the relational model that underpins modern databases.
Computer scientistJohn Backus
Leading the IBM team that created FORTRAN.
Computer scientistSilvio Micali
Co-developing zero-knowledge proofs and mathematical foundations for modern cryptography.
Computer scientistLeslie Lamport
Developing foundations of distributed computing and creating LaTeX.
Computer scientistRasmus Lerdorf
Creating PHP, the scripting language used to build dynamic websites.
Computer scientistMichael Stonebraker
Turning database research into influential systems including Ingres and Postgres.
Computer scientistHåkon Wium Lie
Proposing Cascading Style Sheets, the language that controls how web pages look.
Computer scientistJim Gray
Developing foundational methods for reliable database transactions.
Computer scientistWhitfield Diffie
Pioneering public-key cryptography with Martin Hellman.
Computer scientistMartin Hellman
Co-developing public-key cryptography and the Diffie–Hellman key exchange.
Computer scientistRon Rivest
Co-inventing RSA, a foundational public-key cryptosystem.
ScientistLeonard Adleman
Co-creating RSA encryption and showing that DNA can perform computations.
Computer scientistAndrew Barto
Helping establish the foundations of reinforcement learning.
Computer scientistJames Gosling
Creating the original design of the Java programming language.
Computer scientistBrendan Eich
Creating JavaScript and co-founding Mozilla and Brave.
EntrepreneurMitchell Baker
Helping build Mozilla and its open-source browser project.
EntrepreneurMarc Andreessen
Co-developing Mosaic and co-founding Netscape.
Computer scientistAllen Newell
Helping create early artificial-intelligence programs and models of human problem-solving.
Computer scientistAmir Pnueli
Introducing temporal logic into the verification of computer systems.
Computer scientistGilles Brassard
Co-developing the BB84 protocol for quantum cryptography.
MathematicianJames H. Wilkinson
Explaining and controlling numerical error in computer calculations.
Computer scientistRichard S. Sutton
Developing the foundations of reinforcement learning.
Computer scientistAvi Wigderson
Explaining the role of randomness in computation.
Computer scientistJuris Hartmanis
Establishing foundations of computational complexity theory.
Computer scientistKenneth E. Iverson
Creating APL and its mathematical approach to programming.
Computer scientistAlfred Aho
Developing compiler theory, text-search algorithms and influential computing textbooks.
Computer scientistOle-Johan Dahl
Co-creating Simula and the foundations of object-oriented programming.
Computer scientistMichael O. Rabin
Advancing automata theory and probabilistic algorithms.
Computer scientistManuel Blum
Advancing computational complexity, cryptography and program checking.
Computer scientistKristen Nygaard
Co-developing Simula and the foundations of object-oriented programming.
Computer scientistPeter Naur
Helping define ALGOL 60 and the Backus–Naur notation.
Computer scientistButler Lampson
Helping develop distributed personal computing at Xerox PARC.
Computer scientistRobert Taylor
Leading teams behind computer networking and the personal computer.
Computer scientistRobert Tarjan
Developing fundamental graph algorithms and data structures.
Computer scientistIvan Sutherland
Inventing Sketchpad and pioneering interactive computer graphics
Computer scientistStephen Cook
Establishing a foundation of NP-completeness theory.
Computer scientistCharles Bachman
Early database-management systems and data-structure diagrams.
Computer scientistMaurice Wilkes
Leading EDSAC’s development and introducing microprogramming.
Computer scientistJohn Cocke
Reduced-instruction-set computing and compiler optimisation.
MathematicianRichard Hamming
Error-correcting codes and reliable digital computation.
InventorCharles Babbage
Designing mechanical calculating engines.
Computer scientistRichard E. Stearns
Foundations of computational complexity theory.
Computer scientistRobin Milner
Developing ML and mathematical tools for concurrent computing.
Computer scientistJoseph Sifakis
Developing model checking for computer-system verification.
Computer scientistWilliam Kahan
Shaping reliable floating-point arithmetic in computers.
Computer scientistJack Dongarra
Creating numerical software used in high-performance computing.
Computer scientistCharles P. Thacker
Leading the design of the Xerox Alto computer.
Computer scientistRichard M. Karp
Algorithms and the theory of computational complexity.
Computer scientistDana Scott
Foundations of automata theory and programming-language semantics.