Computer Scientists

Yukihiro Matsumoto

Japanese programmer who created the Ruby programming language

Born 1965

Yann LeCun

French-American AI pioneer who invented convolutional neural networks

Born 1959

Sergey Brin

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

Born 1973

James Gosling

Canadian computer scientist known as the father of Java

Born 1955

Brian Kernighan

Canadian computer scientist who co-wrote The C Programming Language and co-created AWK

Born 1942

Bill Joy

Co-founder of Sun Microsystems and author of the vi editor and BSD Unix

Born 1954

Ashish Vaswani

Lead author of the transformer paper “Attention Is All You Need”

Margo Seltzer

Computer scientist who co-created Berkeley DB

Margaret Hamilton

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

1936 – 2026

Manuel Blum

Venezuelan-born computer scientist who co-invented CAPTCHA

Born 1938

Lynn Conway

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

1938 – 2024

Leslie Valiant

Theorist who created a mathematical foundation for machine learning

Born 1949

Leslie Lamport

Distributed-systems pioneer and creator of LaTeX

Born 1941

Leonard Kleinrock

UCLA scientist whose lab sent the first message over the ARPANET

Born 1934

Leonard Adleman

Co-inventor of RSA encryption and pioneer of DNA computing

Born 1945

Larry Tesler

Computer scientist who invented cut, copy and paste

1945 – 2020

Larry Roberts

ARPA programme manager who designed and led the ARPANET

1937 – 2018

Larry Page

Co-founder of Google and inventor of PageRank

Born 1973

Kristen Nygaard

Norwegian co-inventor of Simula and object-oriented programming

1926 – 2002

Konrad Zuse

German engineer who built the first working programmable computer

1910 – 1995

Kevin Scott

Microsoft’s chief technology officer who brokered its OpenAI partnership

Kenneth E. Iverson

Canadian computer scientist who created the APL programming language

1920 – 2004

Ken Thompson

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

Born 1943

Karen Spärck Jones

British computer scientist who invented inverse document frequency, used in search engines

1935 – 2007