Computer Scientists

Margo Seltzer

Computer scientist who co-created Berkeley DB

Manuel Blum

Venezuelan-born computer scientist who co-invented CAPTCHA

Born 1938

Larry Tesler

Computer scientist who invented cut, copy and paste

1945 – 2020

Kevin Scott

Microsoft’s chief technology officer who brokered its OpenAI partnership

Judea Pearl

AI pioneer who developed Bayesian networks and the science of cause and effect

Born 1936

Joy Buolamwini

Computer scientist who exposed bias in facial recognition and founded the Algorithmic Justice League

Joseph Weizenbaum

MIT computer scientist who created ELIZA and became a critic of AI

1923 – 2008

John Warnock

Co-founder of Adobe and co-creator of PostScript and PDF

1940 – 2023

John L. Hennessy

RISC pioneer, former Stanford president and chairman of Alphabet

Born 1952

John Hopcroft

Computer scientist known for fundamental algorithms and a classic textbook

Born 1939

Jim Gray

Database pioneer who made reliable transaction processing possible

1944 – 2012

Jeff Dean

Google engineer behind MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and Gemini

Born 1968

Jef Raskin

Apple interface expert who started the Macintosh project

1943 – 2005

Weili Dai

Co-founder of Marvell Technology, one of the few women to co-found a major chip company

Vint Cerf

Co-designer of TCP/IP and one of the “fathers of the internet”

Born 1943

Timnit Gebru

AI ethics researcher who founded the DAIR Institute

Steve Crocker

Internet pioneer who wrote the first Request for Comments

Born 1944

Silvio Micali

Italian-American cryptographer and founder of the Algorand blockchain

Born 1954

Shafi Goldwasser

Cryptographer who co-invented zero-knowledge proofs

Born 1958

Ron Rivest

MIT cryptographer and the “R” in the RSA encryption system

Born 1947

Robert Griesemer

Swiss computer scientist who co-designed the Go language and worked on V8

Born 1964

Robert Cailliau

Belgian engineer who co-developed the World Wide Web at CERN

Born 1947

Richard E. Stearns

Co-founder of computational complexity theory with Juris Hartmanis

1936 – 2026

Radia Perlman

Network engineer who invented the spanning-tree protocol, the “mother of the internet”

Born 1951