People from United States

Margaret Hamilton

MIT engineer who led the software for the Apollo Moon landings and coined “software engineering”

1936 – 2026

Marvin Minsky

Co-founder of MIT’s artificial intelligence laboratory and a founding father of AI

1927 – 2016

Lou Gerstner

CEO who rescued IBM in the 1990s

1942 – 2025

Joel Spolsky

Software writer who co-founded Stack Overflow, Trello and Fog Creek

Thomas Edison

Prolific American inventor of the phonograph, practical light bulb and motion-picture camera

1847 – 1931

Nikola Tesla

Serbian-American inventor of the alternating-current induction motor

1856 – 1943

Shawn Fanning

Creator of Napster, the first popular peer-to-peer music service

Born 1980

Peter Norvig

Google’s former director of research and co-author of the leading AI textbook

Born 1956

Jack Dorsey

Co-founder of Twitter and of the payments company Block (Square)

Born 1976

Ken Thompson

Co-creator of Unix and the B language, and co-designer of Go

Born 1943

Jerry Lawson

Engineer who led the first cartridge-based video-game console

1940 – 2011

Jensen Huang

Co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, the chipmaker at the heart of the AI boom

Born 1963

Jean E. Sammet

Programming-language pioneer who helped design COBOL

1928 – 2017

Tim Paterson

Programmer who wrote 86-DOS, which became Microsoft’s MS-DOS

Born 1956

Rajeev Motwani

Stanford professor who mentored Google’s founders

1962 – 2009

Mira Murati

Former OpenAI CTO and founder of Thinking Machines Lab

Born 1988

Mark Zuckerberg

Co-founder and CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta

Born 1984

Eric Schmidt

CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 and later CEO of Relativity Space

Born 1955

Dennis Ritchie

Creator of the C programming language and co-creator of Unix

1941 – 2011

Chris Wanstrath

Co-founder and former CEO of GitHub

Born 1985

Lynn Conway

Computer architect who co-led the VLSI chip-design revolution and championed transgender rights

1938 – 2024

Leslie Lamport

Distributed-systems pioneer and creator of LaTeX

Born 1941

Kimberly Bryant

Engineer who founded Black Girls Code

Born 1967

John Mauchly

Physicist who conceived ENIAC and co-founded the first computer company

1907 – 1980