- List of pioneers in computer science
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This article presents a list of individuals who helped in the creation, development and imagining of what computers and electronics could do.
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Person Achievement Ach. Date John Atanasoff Built the first electronic digital computer, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer, though it was neither programmable nor Turing-complete. 1939 Charles Babbage Designed the Analytical Engine and built a prototype for a less powerful mechanical calculator. 1822
1837John Backus Invented FORTRAN (Formula Translation), the first practical high-level programming language, and he formulated the Backus-Naur form that described the formal language syntax. 1954
1963Jean Bartik One of first computer programmers, on ENIAC (1946), an early Vacuum tube computer back when "programming" involved using cables, dials, and switches to physically rewire the machine. Worked with John Mauchly toward BINAC (1949), EDVAC (1949), UNIVAC (1951) to develop early "Stored program" computers. 1924
2011George Boole Formalized Boolean algebra, the basis for digital logic and computer science. 1847
1854Nikolay Brusentsov Built ternary computer Setun. 1958 Tim Berners-Lee Invented worldwide web. With Robert Cailliau, sent first HTTP communication between client and server. 1989
1990Vannevar Bush Analogue computing pioneer. Originator of the Memex concept, which led to the development of Hypertext. 1930 Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn Designed the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), the primary data communication protocols of the Internet and other computer networks. 1978 Bryan Cantrill Created the first implementation of dynamic tracing, DTrace, which was previously thought an impossible problem. 2005 Alonzo Church Founded contributions to theoretical computer science, specifically for the development of the lambda calculus and the discovery of the undecidability problem within it. 1936 Wesley A. Clark Designed LINC, the first functional computer scaled down and priced for the individual user. Put in service in 1963, many of its features are seen as prototypes of what were to be essential elements of personal computers. 1962 Edmund M. Clarke Developed model checking and formal verification of software and hardware together with E. Allen Emerson. 1981 Edgar F. Codd Proposed and formalized the relational model of data management, the theoretical basis of relational databases. 1970 Stephen Cook Formalized the notion of NP-completeness, inspiring a great deal of research in computational complexity theory. 1971 James Cooley With John W. Tukey, created the Fast Fourier Transform. 1965 Ole-Johan Dahl With Kristen Nygaard, invented the proto-object oriented language SIMULA. 1962 Edsger Dijkstra Made advances in algorithms, Goto considered harmful, the semaphore (programming), rigor, and pedagogy. 1968 J. Presper Eckert With John Mauchly, designed and built the ENIAC, the first modern (all electronic, Turing-complete) computer, and the UNIVAC I, the first commercially available computer. 1943
1951E. Allen Emerson Developed model checking and formal verification of software and hardware together with Edmund M. Clarke. 1981 Douglas Engelbart Best known for inventing the computer mouse (in a joint effort with Bill English); as a pioneer of human-computer interaction whose Augment team developed hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs. 1963 Tommy Flowers Designed and built the Mark 1 and the ten improved Mark 2 Colossus computers, the world’s first programmable, digital, electronic, computing devices. 1943 Gottlob Frege Developed first-order predicate calculus, which was a crucial precursor requirement to developing computation theory. 1879 Seymour Ginsburg Proved "don't-care" circuit minimization does not necessarily yield optimal results, proved that the ALGOL programming language is context-free (thus linking formal language theory to the problem of compiler writing), and invented AFL Theory. 1958
1961
1967Kurt Gödel Proved that Peano axiomatized arithmetic could not be both logically consistent and complete in first-order predicate calculus. Church, Kleene, and Turing developed the foundations of computation theory based on corollaries to Gödel's work. 1931 Lois Haibt Was a member of the ten person team that invented Fortran and among the first women to play a crucial role in the development of computer science. 1954 C.A.R. Hoare Developed the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) and Quicksort. 1960
1978Grace Hopper Pioneered work on the necessity for high-level programming languages, which she termed automatic programming, and wrote the A-O compiler, which heavily influenced the COBOL language. 1952 Cuthbert Hurd Helped the International Business Machines Corporation develop its first general-purpose computer, the IBM 701. 1952 Kenneth E. Iverson Assisted in establishing the first graduate course in computer science (at Harvard) and taught that course; invented the APL programming language and made contribution to interactive computing. 1954; 1962 Jacek Karpinski Developed the first differential analyzer that used transistors, and developed one of the first machine learning algorithms for character and image recognition. Also was the inventor of one of the first minicomputers, the K-202. 1973 Alan Kay Pioneered many of the ideas at the root of object-oriented programming languages, led the team that developed Smalltalk, and made fundamental contributions to personal computing. 1970~ Stephen Cole Kleene Pioneered work with Alonzo Church on the Lambda Calculus that first laid down the foundations of computation theory. 1936 Donald Knuth Wrote The Art of Computer Programming and created TeX. 1968
1989Leslie Lamport Formulated algorithms to solve many fundamental problems in distributed systems (e.g. the bakery algorithm).
Developed the concept of a logical clock, enabling synchronization between distributed entities based on the events through which they communicate.1974
1978Sergei Alekseyevich Lebedev Independently designed the first electronic computer in the Soviet Union, MESM, in Kiev, Ukraine. 1951 Gottfried Leibniz Made advances in symbolic logic, such as the Calculus ratiocinator, that were heavily influential on Gottlob Frege. Made developments in first-order predicate calculus that were crucial for the theoretical foundations of computer science. 1670~ Ramon Llull Designed multiple symbolic representations machines, and pioneered notions of symbolic representation and manipulation to produce knowledge—both of which were major influences on Leibniz. 1300~ J. C. R. Licklider Began the investigation of human-computer interaction, leading to many advances in computer interfaces as well as in cybernetics and artificial intelligence. 1960 Ada Lovelace Began the study of scientific computation, analyzing Babbage's work in her Sketch of the Analytical Engine, and was the namesake for the Ada programming language. 1843 John Mauchly With J. Presper Eckert, designed and built the ENIAC, the first modern (all electronic, Turing-complete) computer, and the UNIVAC I, the first commercially available computer. Also worked on BINAC(1949), EDVAC(1949), UNIVAC(1951) with Grace Hopper and Jean Bartik, to develop early "Stored_program" computers. 1943
1951John McCarthy Invented LISP, a functional programming language. 1955 Marvin Minsky Co-founder of Artificial Intelligence Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , author of several texts on AI and philosophy. 1963 Max Newman Instigated the production of the Colossus computers at Bletchley Park. After the war he established the Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester where the world’s first Stored-program computer, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine was invented. 1943 John von Neumann Devised the von Neumann architecture upon which most modern computers are based. 1945 Kristen Nygaard With Ole-Johan Dahl, invented the proto-object oriented language SIMULA. 1962 Emil L. Post Developed the Post machine as a model of computation, independently of Turing. Known also for developing truth tables, the Post correspondence problem used in recursion theory as well as proving what is known as Post's theorem. 1936 Gerard Salton A pioneer of automatic information retrieval, who proposed the vector space model and the inverted index. 1975 Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson Pioneered the C programming language and the UNIX computer operating system at Bell Labs. 1967 Claude Shannon Founded information theory and practical digital circuit design. 1937
1948Herbert Simon A political scientist and economist who pioneered artificial intelligence. Co-creator of the Logic Theory Machine and the General Problem Solver programs. 1956
1957Ivan Sutherland Author of Sketchpad, the ancestor of modern computer-aided drafting (CAD) programs and one of the early examples of object-oriented programming. 1963 John W. Tukey With James Cooley, created the Fast Fourier Transform. 1965 Alan Turing Made several founding contributions to computer science, including the Turing machine computational model, and ACE design. 1936 Maurice Wilkes Built the first practical stored program computer (EDSAC) to be completed and for being credited with the ideas of several high-level programming language constructs. 1949 Niklaus Wirth Designed the Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon programming languages. 1970
1978Konrad Zuse Built the first functional tape-stored-program-controlled computer, the Z3. The Z3 was proven to be Turing-complete in 1998. 1941 ~ Item marks with a tilde are circa dates
See also
External links
Categories:- Computer pioneers
- Lists of computer scientists
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