Computer Scientists

Grace Hopper

US Navy rear admiral who wrote the first compiler and helped create COBOL

1906 – 1992

Frank Rosenblatt

Psychologist who invented the perceptron, an early learning neural network

1928 – 1971

Fernando J. Corbató

MIT pioneer of time-sharing and creator of the computer password

1926 – 2019

Fei-Fei Li

Stanford computer scientist who created ImageNet, the “godmother of AI”

Born 1976

Ed Catmull

Computer-graphics pioneer and co-founder of Pixar

Born 1945

Douglas Engelbart

Inventor of the computer mouse and pioneer of interactive computing

1925 – 2013

Donald Davies

British scientist who coined “packet switching” and built an early packet network

1924 – 2000

David Silver

British researcher who led AlphaGo and AlphaZero

Charles P. Thacker

Engineer who designed the Xerox Alto, the first modern personal computer

1943 – 2017

Bob Kahn

Co-inventor of TCP/IP and architect of the internet’s design

Born 1938

Bill Joy

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

Born 1954

Andrej Karpathy

AI researcher and educator who led Tesla’s Autopilot vision and co-founded OpenAI

Born 1986

Amnon Shashua

Israeli computer scientist who co-founded Mobileye

Born 1960

Alfred Aho

Canadian computer scientist, author of the “Dragon Book” and co-creator of AWK

Born 1941

Adele Goldberg

Xerox PARC researcher who co-developed Smalltalk

Born 1945

Abraham Lempel

Israeli computer scientist who co-invented Lempel–Ziv compression

1936 – 2023

Manuel Blum

Venezuelan-born computer scientist who co-invented CAPTCHA

Born 1938

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

Jim Clark

Founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon

Born 1944

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

Terry Winograd

Stanford professor who built SHRDLU and advised Google’s founders

Born 1946

Ted Nelson

Visionary who coined the words “hypertext” and “hypermedia”

Born 1937