Computer Scientists
155 profiles
James H. Wilkinson
English mathematician who laid the foundations of reliable numerical computing
1919 – 1986
Technology
James Gosling
Canadian computer scientist known as the father of Java
Born 1955
Science
Ilya Sutskever
Deep-learning researcher who co-founded OpenAI and Safe Superintelligence
Born 1986
Science
Geoffrey Hinton
“Godfather of AI” and Nobel laureate who made neural networks work
Born 1947
Science
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Dutch computer scientist famous for the shortest-path algorithm and structured programming
1930 – 2002
Science
Donald Knuth
Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of the TeX typesetting system
Born 1938
Science
David Patterson
Berkeley professor who coined RISC and co-created RAID
Born 1947
Technology
Arkady Volozh
Founder of Yandex, Russia’s search giant, and CEO of Nebius
Born 1964
Science
Andrew Yao
Turing Award-winning theorist who built China’s top computer science programme
Born 1946
Science
Andrew Ng
AI educator who co-founded Google Brain and Coursera
Born 1976
Alan Perlis
Programming-language pioneer and the first winner of the Turing Award
1922 – 1990
Science
Alan Kay
Xerox PARC visionary behind Smalltalk, the Dynabook and modern graphical interfaces
Born 1940
Science
Adi Shamir
Israeli cryptographer, the “S” in RSA
Born 1952
Science
Lynn Conway
Computer architect who co-led the VLSI chip-design revolution and championed transgender rights
1938 – 2024
Science
Leslie Valiant
Theorist who created a mathematical foundation for machine learning
Born 1949
Science
Leonard Adleman
Co-inventor of RSA encryption and pioneer of DNA computing
Born 1945
Technology
Larry Roberts
ARPA programme manager who designed and led the ARPANET
1937 – 2018
Technology
Larry Page
Co-founder of Google and inventor of PageRank
Born 1973
Science
Kenneth E. Iverson
Canadian computer scientist who created the APL programming language
1920 – 2004
Science
Karen Spärck Jones
British computer scientist who invented inverse document frequency, used in search engines
1935 – 2007
Technology
Kai-Fu Lee
Taiwanese AI pioneer and investor who led Google China and founded 01.AI
Born 1961
Science
Juris Hartmanis
Latvian-born computer scientist who founded computational complexity theory
1928 – 2022
Science
Jürgen Schmidhuber
German AI researcher whose lab co-invented the LSTM neural network
Born 1963
Technology
Jon Postel
Internet pioneer who managed IANA and edited the RFC series
1943 – 1998