Bell Labs

Brian Kernighan

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

Born 1942

Rob Pike

Canadian programmer who co-created the Go language and UTF-8

Dennis Ritchie

Creator of the C programming language and co-creator of Unix

1941 – 2011

Ken Thompson

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

Born 1943

Richard Hamming

Mathematician at Bell Labs who invented error-correcting Hamming codes

1915 – 1998

Willard Boyle

Canadian physicist who co-invented the CCD image sensor

1924 – 2011

Claude Shannon

Father of information theory and the digital age

1916 – 2001

Bjarne Stroustrup

Danish computer scientist who created the C++ programming language

Born 1950

John Bardeen

Only person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice — for the transistor and superconductivity

1908 – 1991

William Shockley

Nobel-winning co-inventor of the transistor who brought silicon to Silicon Valley

1910 – 1989

Walter Brattain

Bell Labs physicist who co-invented the transistor

1902 – 1987

Alfred Aho

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

Born 1941

George E. Smith

Bell Labs physicist who co-invented the CCD image sensor

1930 – 2025