Turing Award

Yann LeCun

French-American AI pioneer who invented convolutional neural networks

Born 1959

Leslie Lamport

Distributed-systems pioneer and creator of LaTeX

Born 1941

John Cocke

IBM researcher who invented RISC computer architecture

1925 – 2002

Vint Cerf

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

Born 1943

Tim Berners-Lee

Inventor of the World Wide Web

Born 1955

Peter Naur

Danish computer scientist who edited the ALGOL 60 report and refined Backus–Naur form

1928 – 2016

Pat Hanrahan

Graphics researcher who designed Pixar’s RenderMan and co-founded Tableau

Marvin Minsky

Co-founder of MIT’s artificial intelligence laboratory and a founding father of AI

1927 – 2016

Martin Hellman

Stanford cryptographer who co-invented public-key cryptography

Born 1945

Herbert A. Simon

Nobel-winning economist and AI pioneer who studied how people make decisions

1916 – 2001

David Patterson

Berkeley professor who coined RISC and co-created RAID

Born 1947

Allen Newell

AI and cognitive-science pioneer who co-created the first reasoning programs

1927 – 1992

Manuel Blum

Venezuelan-born computer scientist who co-invented CAPTCHA

Born 1938

Leslie Valiant

Theorist who created a mathematical foundation for machine learning

Born 1949

Leonard Adleman

Co-inventor of RSA encryption and pioneer of DNA computing

Born 1945

Kristen Nygaard

Norwegian co-inventor of Simula and object-oriented programming

1926 – 2002

Kenneth E. Iverson

Canadian computer scientist who created the APL programming language

1920 – 2004

Ken Thompson

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

Born 1943

Juris Hartmanis

Latvian-born computer scientist who founded computational complexity theory

1928 – 2022

Judea Pearl

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

Born 1936

Joseph Sifakis

Greek-French computer scientist who independently pioneered model checking

Born 1946

John McCarthy

Computer scientist who coined the term “artificial intelligence” and invented Lisp

1927 – 2011

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