Computer Scientists
155 profiles
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
Science
John von Neumann
Hungarian-American mathematician who defined the architecture of modern computers
1903 – 1957
Science
John McCarthy
Computer scientist who coined the term “artificial intelligence” and invented Lisp
1927 – 2011
Science
John Backus
IBM engineer who led the creation of Fortran, the first widely used high-level language
1924 – 2007
Jeffrey Ullman
Stanford computer scientist and textbook author on compilers, databases and algorithms
Born 1942
Science
William Kahan
Mathematician known as the father of floating-point arithmetic
Born 1933
Science
Whitfield Diffie
Co-inventor of public-key cryptography
Born 1944
Science
Tim Berners-Lee
Inventor of the World Wide Web
Born 1955
Technology
Sophie Wilson
Computer scientist who designed the ARM instruction set and BBC BASIC
Science
Shane Legg
New Zealand AI researcher who co-founded DeepMind and popularised “AGI”
Science
Sepp Hochreiter
German computer scientist who co-invented LSTM and xLSTM
Born 1967
Science
Sebastian Thrun
German-American roboticist who led Google’s self-driving car project and founded Udacity
Born 1967
Robin Milner
British computer scientist who created the ML language and theories of concurrency
1934 – 2010
Robert W. Floyd
Computer scientist who pioneered proving that programs are correct
1936 – 2001
Science
Richard S. Sutton
Canadian-American scientist who founded modern reinforcement learning
Science
Richard M. Karp
Computer scientist who showed that many everyday problems are NP-complete
Born 1935
Science
Raj Reddy
Indian-American AI pioneer and the first Asian-born winner of the Turing Award
Born 1937
Ole-Johan Dahl
Norwegian co-inventor of Simula, the first object-oriented programming language
1931 – 2002
Science
Niklaus Wirth
Swiss computer scientist who designed the Pascal programming language
1934 – 2024