Great names in computer science
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I gave up any attempt to sort this list by “importance”
(too risk) or “category” (frontiers are not always well
defined). Instead, I have simply chosen alphabetical order.
Chronological order would probably have been better, had I been able
to find everybody's birth date, but such is not the case.
Furthermore, please consider this list as permanently
incomplete and permanently inaccurate.
You are welcome to send me corrections to this list. You are also
welcome to suggest additions. I'll consider for addition anyone who
seems to have made a significant contribution to computer science (in
any domain). More probably, I'll just ignore the suggestion, because
this list isn't supposed to make any kind of sense, anyway. Moreover,
I will certainly not consider any suggestions for removing
people from the list.
Here's a chronological list for those people of whom I do
know the birth date: Blaise Pascal, Charles Babbage, Ada
Lovelace, Haskell Brooks Curry, Alonzo Church, John von
Neumann, Grace Hopper, Stephen Kleene, Alan Turing,
Claude Shannon, Alan
Perlis, John Backus, Seymour
Cray, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Edsger
Dijkstra, Niklaus Wirth, Donald Knuth, Bob Kahn, Dennis Ritchie, Ken
Thompson, Vinton Cerf, Jon
Postel, Whitfield Diffie, Robert Tarjan, Bjarne
Stroustrup, Steve Wozniak, Richard Stevens, Richard
Stallman, Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds.
- Harold Abelson
- (web page)
Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Along with Gerald Sussman, Abelson is the
author of Structure and Interpretation of Computer
Programs, the fabled Wizard Book.
- Eric Allman
- (web page) Eric Allman is
the main author of the sendmail
program, which is used by most Unix-like systems to deliver
SMTP (emails), although certain alternatives have become popular, such
as Daniel Bernstein's qmail program. Eric Allman is
Kirk McKusick's partner.
- Charles Babbage
- Born: Monday, December 26,
1791, in London (England). Died: Wednesday, October 18, 1871, in
London (England). Babbage is considered one of the forefathers of
computer science for having designed and built the difference engine,
and having imagined (with the help of Ada
Lovelace) the analytical engine, which,
although it was never built in his lifetime, can be considered as a
true (mechanical) computer. See also Babbage's biography
on the MacTutor
History of Mathematics archive.
- John W. Backus
- Born: Wednesday, December
3, 1924, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA). John
Backus headed the development group at IBM which gave
birth to the language FORTRAN (the oldest programming language,
excepting theoretical concepts like the Lambda Calculus, and, of
course, assembler). John Backus is the 1977 recipient of the ACM's A. M. Turing
Award and a charter recipient of the IEEE Computer
Society's Pioneer
Award.
- Tim Berners-Lee
- (web page) Born:
Wednesday, June 8, 1955, in London (UK). Tim Berners-Lee
is the inventor of what is now known as the World Wide Web: his original
proposal for Information Management, circulated in 1989, is the
founding idea of the hypertext information web; and he is the author
of the original internet draft specifications of HTTP,
HTML
and URLs
in 1993 (current specifications: HTTP,
XHTML and URI).
- Daniel Julius Bernstein
- (web page)
- Vinton Cerf
- (web page
— sort of) Born: Wednesday, June 23, 1943, in Newhaven,
Connecticut (USA). Vinton Cerf is the father of the
Internet. He and Bob Kahn are the principal
architects of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
that is one of the foundational stones of the Internet (see for
example this
historical document), as well as the earlier Network Control
Protocol (NCP). His speech The
Internet is for Everyone, given at the Computers,
Freedom and Privacy conference on April 7, 1999, defined the Internet Society's new motto. Now
Vinton Cerf's interests include planning the development of the InterPlanetary Internet. Vinton
Cerf is the 2004 recipient of the ACM's A. M. Turing
Award.
- Sivasubramanian
Chandrasegarampilai
- Designer of the Heuristically programmed
ALgorithmic (HAL) computer.
- Alonzo Church
- Born: Sunday, June 14, 1903, in
Washington, DC (USA). Died: Friday, August
11, 1995, in Hudson, Ohio (USA). Alonzo Church is the
inventor of the Lambda
Calculus, which is in a way the first programming language ever.
See also Church's biography
on the MacTutor
History of Mathematics archive.
- Alan Cox
- (web
page — sort of) Alan Cox is the vice-pinguin after Linus Torvalds.
- Seymour R. Cray
- Born: Monday, September 28,
1925, in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin (USA). Died:
Saturday, October 5, 1996, in Colorado Springs, Colorado
(USA). He founded Cray Research in 1972; in 1976, he
unveiled the CRAY-1, the world's first supercomputer. Seymour Cray is
a charter recipient of the IEEE Computer
Society's Pioneer
Award.
- Haskell Brooks Curry
- Born: Wednesday, September
12, 1900, in Millis, Massachusetts (USA). Died:
Wednesday, September 1, 1982, in State College, Pennsylvania
(USA). The programming language Haskell is named after him; and so
is the “currying” operation on functions of several
arguments. See also Curry's biography
on the MacTutor
History of Mathematics archive.
- David Cutler
- (fan club) Architect of DEC's VMS operating
system, and of Microsoft's
Windows NT.
- Theo de Raadt
- (web site) Theo de Raadt is
the founder of the OpenBSD
project after a dispute with the NetBSD core team in 1995.
- L. Peter Deutsch
- Peter Deutsch
encountered the world of the True Hackers of the “Tech Model
Railroad Club” (at MIT AI Lab) at age twelve
when he discovered the TX-0's console. In 1963, when he
was still a high school student, he developped the first interactive
implementation of Lisp, for the PDP-1 computer. He
worked on Smalltalk at Xerox
PARC from 1971 to 1986. He is the author of the ghostscript program, started in
1986 (for which he promised Richard Stallman
that all versions would eventually be released under the GNU
GPL). He presides Aladdin Enterprises.
- Whitfield Diffie
- Born: Monday, June 5, 1944.
Inventor of public key cryptography.
- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
- (web
page) Born: 1930, in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). Died: Tuesday,
August 6, 2002, in Nuenen (the Netherlands). Edsger Dijkstra is the
inventor of the concept of semaphore, which is at the basis
of all synchronized programming. He is also one of the main
contributors to the language ALGOL. Edsger Dijkstra is the 1972
recipient of the ACM's
A. M. Turing
Award and a charter recipient of the IEEE Computer
Society's Pioneer Award.
His famous speech, Go To Statement
Considered Harmful, has become a classic.
- John “Captain Crunch” Draper
- (web page) Fame —
and trouble — came to John Draper when he discovered a way to
crack (“phreak”) into the phone company's network.
- Jim Ellis
- Born: 1956? Died: Thursday, June 28,
2001, in Harmony, Pennsylvania (USA). Jim Ellis was
co-creator of Usenet.
- John “GNU” Gilmore
- (web page) John Gilmore is the
co-founder of Cygnus Solutions,
and of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation.
- James Gosling
- (web page) Gosling is the
inventor of the Java
programming language.
- Richard William Gosper
- Born: 1943? One of the
True Hackers, the mathematician of the lot, and sometime mentor to RMS. He was fascinated by Conway's
“Game of Life” when he learned about it, and he
contributed much to its study. He later took part in the writing of
the MacSyma program.
- Richard Greenblatt
- Arch-Hacker of the True
Hackers. Richard Greenblatt is the inventor of the Lisp machine, and
his “betrayal” by the Symbolics team brought the end of
the True Hackers' era.
- Grace Brewster Murray Hopper
- Born (Grace
Brewster Murray): Sunday, December 9, 1906, in New York City, New York
(USA). Died: Wednesday, January 1, 1992, in Arlington,
Virginia (USA). She was rear admiral in the United
States Navy. She programmed the world's first computers, notably the
Mark I through Mark III. Later, she had a hand in
standardizing COBOL.
- Jordan Hubbard
- (web page) Co-founder of
the FreeBSD project.
- David Albert Huffman
- Born: 1925? Inventor of
a method for constructing binary trees which is of great importance in
compression theory.
- Steven Jobs
- Born: February 1955 (adopted after
birth), in Los Altos, California (USA). Steve Jobs is
the co-founder of Apple.
- William N. Joy
- Born: 1955? Bill Joy started
the “BSD”
flavor of Unix, with Chuck
Halley. He is co-founder of Sun
Microsystems (with Andreas Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla and Scott
McNealy). Bill Joy is the 1986 recipient of the ACM's G. M. Hopper
Award.
- Robert E. Kahn
- Born: Friday, December 23,
1938, in New York City, New York (USA). Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf are the principal architects of the
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that is one of the
foundational stones of the Internet. Bob Kahn is a 1996 recipient of
the IEEE Computer
Society's Pioneer Award and
the 2004 recipient of the ACM's A. M. Turing
Award.
- Brian Wilson Kernighan
- (web page) Brian
Kernighan is the co-inventor, with Alfred Aho and Peter Weinberg, of
the Awk programming language. He is co-author, with Dennis Ritchie, of the Book on C.
His critique of
the Pascal language is justly famous.
- Stephen Cole Kleene
- Born: Tuesday, January 5,
1909, in Hartford, Connecticut (USA). Died: Tuesday,
January 25, 1994, in Madison, Wisconsin (USA). See also
Kleene's biography
on the MacTutor
History of Mathematics archive.
- Tom Knight
- (web page) One of
the True Hackers. Tom Knight had a hand (with Greenblatt and others) in developping the
Incompatible Timesharing System, and he gave it its name.
- Donald Ervin Knuth
- (web page) Born:
Monday, January 10, 1938, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (USA).
Donald Knuth is the author of the (multi-volume, never-to-be-finished)
treatise on programming entitled The Art Of Computer
Programming (TAOCP). Because he was unhappy about
the typesetter's job in printing this treatise, he invented (in the
1970's) his own typesetting program: TeX, which is still around and much
used today. Donald Knuth is the 1974 recipient of the ACM's A. M. Turing
Award, the 1971 recipient of the G. M. Hopper
Award, a charter recipient of the IEEE Computer
Society's Pioneer
Award.
- David C. “Tale”
Lawrence
- Tale is one of the Usenet pioneers.
- Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace
- Born:
Sunday, December 10, 1815, in Piccadily (England). Died: Saturday,
November 27, 1852, in London (England). She was a daughter of the
poet Lord Byron. She is often counted as the first
“programmer”, for her work on Babbage's Analytical Engine. The programming
language Ada is named after her.
See also Ada Lovelace's biography
on the MacTutor
History of Mathematics archive.
- John McCarthy
- (web page). Born:
Sunday, September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts
(USA). John McCarthy is the co-founder, with Marvin Minsky, of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
at MIT, where, among
other things, the True Hackers were bred — and he was something
of an uncle to them all. He is also the inventor of the name, if not
the term, of “artificial intelligence”. He is the
inventor of the Lisp programming language (the second oldest after
FORTRAN, and still considered unequaled by some), in 1958. John
McCarthy is the 1971 recipient of the ACM's A. M. Turing
Award and a 1985 recipient of the IEEE Computer
Society's Pioneer
Award.
- Marshall Kirk McKusick
- (web page) Kirk McKusick is one of
the early developpers of BSD Unix. He designed and
implemented the 4.2BSD Fast File System, and oversaw the development
and release of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD. He collaborates with the teams of
all the BSD-descended systems, and recently contributed the
“SoftUpdates” filesystem extension. He is Eric Allman's companion.
- Marvin Minsky
- (web page)
Born: Tuesday, August 9, 1927, in New York City, New York
(USA). Marvin Minsky is the co-founder, with John McCarthy, of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
at MIT, where, among
other things, the True Hackers were bred. Marvin Minsky has written
many an influential text on artificial intelligence. Marvin Minsky is
the 1969 recipient of the ACM's A. M. Turing
Award and a 1995 recipient of the IEEE Computer
Society's Pioneer
Award.
- Blaise Pascal
- Born: Monday, June 19, 1623, in
Clermont (France). Died: Saturday, August 19, 1662, in Paris
(France). Pascal is the inventor of a digital calculator (and
consequently counted as one of the forefathers of computer science),
the “Pascaline”, but it would seem, in fact, that a
calculator had already been invented by Schickard in 1624. The
programming language Pascal (invented by Niklaus
Wirth) is named after Blaise Pascal (see also Brian Kernighan's critique of this language).
See also Pascal's biography
on the MacTutor
History of Mathematics archive.
- Bruce Perens
- (web
page)
- Alan J. Perlis
- Born: Saturday, April 1,
1922, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA). Died:
Wednesday, February 7, 1990, in New Haven, Connecticut
(USA). Alan Perlis was the first head of CMU's Computer Science
Department. His taste for epigrams has left us many wise sayings
about computers and computer science, such as “Syntactic sugar
causes cancer of the semicolon”. Alan Perlis is the 1966
(first) recipient of the ACM's A. M. Turing
Award and a 1985 recipient of the IEEE Computer
Society's Pioneer
Award.
- Jonathan B. Postel
- (web page) Born: Friday, August
6, 1943, in Altadena, California (USA). Died: Friday,
October 16, 1998, in Los Angeles, California (USA). Jon
Postel created the RFC (“Requests For
Comments”) series of documents, and was the
RFC editor until his death.
- Dennis M. Ritchie
- (web page) Born:
Tuesday, September 9, 1941, in Mount Vernon, New York
(USA). Dennis Ritchie invented the C
programming language, for use with Ken
Thompson's recently invented Unix system, during his work
at AT&T Bell
Labs in 1969. He is co-author, with Brian
Kernighan, of the Book on C.
Dennis Ritchie is the 1983 recipient of the ACM's A. M. Turing
Award (with Ken Thompson) and a 1994
recipient of the IEEE
Computer Society's Pioneer
Award.
- Eric Steven Raymond
- (web page)
- Adi Shamir
- Adi Shamir is the 2002 recipient of
the ACM's A. M. Turing
Award.
- Claude Elwood Shannon
- Born: Sunday, April 30,
1916, in Gaylord, Michigan (USA). Died: Saturday,
February 24, 2001, in Medford, Massachusetts (USA). The
father of information theory. See also Shannon's biography
on the MacTutor
History of Mathematics archive.
- Gene Spafford
- (web page) Spaf is
one of the Usenet pioneers, and more or less gave it its current form.
He is a computer security expert.
- Richard Matthew Stallman
(“RMS”)
- (web page) Born: Monday, March 16,
1953, in New York City, New York (USA). Last of the True
Hackers. RMS is the author of the Emacs editor.
He founded the GNU (“Gnu's Not
Unix”) project in September 1983, to write a free clone of Ken Thompson's Unix operating system. He is
the president of the Free Software Foundation, which he founded to
host the GNU project. Richard Stallman is the 1990 recipient of the ACM's G. M. Hopper
Award. He was also made a MacArthur foundation fellow
(“genius”) for the 1990–1995 term.
- Guy Lewis Steele, Jr.
- Guy Steele is one of the
inventors, with Gerry Sussman, of the Scheme
programming language (a descendant of Lisp). He is employed by Sun Microsystems, where he has among
other things helped develop the specifications of the Java language.
Guy Steele is the 1988 recipient of the ACM's G. M. Hopper
Award.
- W. Richard Stevens
- (web page) Born: 1951, in
Luanshya (Northern Rhodesia). Died: Wednesday, September 1,
1999.
- Bjarne Stroustrup
- (web page)
Born: 1950, in Aarhus (Denmark). Stroustrup invended the C++
programming language.
- Gerald Jay Sussman
- (web page)
Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Gerry Sussman is one of the inventors, with Guy
Stele, of the Scheme
programming language (a descendant of Lisp). Along with Harold Abelson, Sussman is the author of
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, the
fabled Wizard Book.
- Robert Endre Tarjan
- (web page) Born: Friday,
April 30, 1948, in Pomona, California (USA). Robert
Tarjan is the 1986 recipient of the ACM's A. M. Turing
Award and the 1982 (first) recipient of the International
Mathematicians' Union Nevanlinna Prize.
- Kenneth Thompson
- (web page) Born:
Thursday, February 4, 1943, in New Orleans, Louisiana
(USA). Ken Thompson invented the operating system Unix during his work at
AT&T Bell
Labs in 1970. Ken Thompson is the 1983 recipient of the ACM's A. M. Turing
Award (with Dennis Ritchie) and a 1994
recipient of the IEEE
Computer Society's Pioneer
Award.
- Linus Benedict Torvalds
- (web page) Born:
Sunday, December 28, 1969, in Helsinki (Finland). Linus is the author
of the Linux operating system
kernel, which has, in a way, provided a successful term to the GNU
project started by Richard Stallman.
- Alan Mathison Turing
- Born: Sunday, June 23,
1912, in London (England). Died: Monday, June 7, 1954, in Wilmslow,
Cheshire (England). Turing was one of Alonzo
Church's doctoral students. In 1936, he defined what is now
referred to as a “Turing machine”, and proved the
universality theorem. He is often considered as the founder of
computer science. During WW2, he became a hero by
building a machine which could decode the German communications
enciphered by means of the “enigma” device. He was
homosexual, and completely open about it; but homosexual acts were
forbidden in England until 1966. After Turing was convicted in 1952,
he was made to take hormonal injections which made him deeply unhappy.
He died of cyanide poisoning, and while it is often thought to have
been suicide, it was more probably accidental. See also Turing's biography
on the MacTutor
History of Mathematics archive.
- John von Neumann
- Born: Monday, December
28, 1903, in Budapest (Hungary). Died: Friday, February 8, 1957, in
Washington DC (USA). Von Neumann is
credited with the idea of having a computer store its instructions
(code) in the same memory as it stores its data (rather than,
e.g. in hardwired form). This makes him the inventor of the
modern computer. See also von Neumann's biography
on the MacTutor
History of Mathematics archive.
- Paul Vixie
- (web
page — sort of) Paul Vixie is a director of the Internet Software Consortium
- Larry Wall
- (web page) Larry Wall wrote the
“patch” program. He is the inventor of the Perl programming language.
- Niklaus E. Wirth
- Born: Thursday, February
15, 1934, in Winterhur (Switzerland). Wirth is the inventor of the
Pascal programming language (named in honor of Blaise Pascal). Niklaus Wirth is the 1984
recipient of the ACM's
A. M. Turing
Award and a 1987 recipient of the IEEE Computer
Society's Pioneer
Award.
- Stephen Wozniak
- (web page) Born: Friday, August 11,
1950. Wozniak designed the first “Apple” computer.
Stephen Wozniak is the 1979 recipient of the ACM's G. M. Hopper
Award.
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Last modified: $Date: 2005/09/04 07:10:37 $