People from United States

John Mauchly

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

1907 – 1980

John Cocke

IBM researcher who invented RISC computer architecture

1925 – 2002

Jeff Atwood

Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse

Tony Fadell

“Father of the iPod” and co-creator of the iPhone, founder of Nest

Born 1969

Steven Sasson

Kodak engineer who built the first digital camera

Born 1950

Steve Huffman

Co-founder and CEO of Reddit

Born 1983

Steve Chen

Taiwanese-American co-founder and first CTO of YouTube

Born 1978

Shuji Nakamura

Japanese-American engineer who invented the bright blue LED

Born 1954

Sergey Brin

Russian-born co-founder of Google who returned to work on Gemini AI

Born 1973

Robert Tarjan

Computer scientist who designed many of the fundamental graph algorithms and data structures

Born 1948

Richard Hamming

Mathematician at Bell Labs who invented error-correcting Hamming codes

1915 – 1998

Ray Kurzweil

Inventor and futurist known for predicting the technological singularity

Born 1948

Philippe Kahn

French founder of Borland who shared the first camera-phone photo

Born 1952

Paul Graham

Co-founder of Y Combinator and influential essayist on start-ups

Born 1964

Norbert Wiener

MIT mathematician who founded cybernetics

1894 – 1964

Nat Friedman

Former GitHub CEO who launched Copilot and now leads product at Meta Superintelligence Labs

Born 1977

Matt Mullenweg

Co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic

Born 1984

Martin Hellman

Stanford cryptographer who co-invented public-key cryptography

Born 1945

Grady Booch

Software engineer who co-created the Unified Modeling Language

Born 1955

Gene Amdahl

IBM System/360 architect and author of Amdahl’s law

1922 – 2015

Donald Knuth

Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of the TeX typesetting system

Born 1938

David Patterson

Berkeley professor who coined RISC and co-created RAID

Born 1947

Dario Amodei

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the company behind Claude

Born 1983

Claude Shannon

Father of information theory and the digital age

1916 – 2001