List of pioneers in computer science
 |
This article presents a list of individuals who helped in the creation, development and imagining of what computers and electronics could do.
| 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 1837 |
| John 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 1963 |
| George Boole | Formalized Boolean algebra, the basis for digital logic and computer science. | 1830~ |
| Nikolay Brusentsov | Built ternary computer Setun. | 1958 |
| 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. | 1972 |
| 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 1951 |
| E. 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 |
| 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 1967 |
| Kurt 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 1978 |
| Grace 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 1989 |
| Leslie 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 1978 |
| Sergei 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. | 1943 1951 |
| John McCarthy | Invented LISP, a functional programming language. | 1955 |
| 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 |
| 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 1948 |
| Herbert Simon | A political scientist and economist who pioneered artificial intelligence. Co-creator of the Logic Theory Machine and the General Problem Solver programs. | 1956 1957 |
| Ivan 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 1978 |
| Konrad 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