Most influential people in computer science
The history of computer science is full of men and women from different fields that have contributed to build the era of information as we know it.
This list is, by no means, complete, but it will give you a tour of the achievements of some of the big names you may encounter in your journey through the tech world…
The Pioneers
Al-Khwarizmi
This Persian scholar famous for putting together a complete understanding of algebra as the field of mathematics we all know and love 😜, and other notable works in astronomy, geography and now we can hear his influence in the form a term used by many without really knowing about its origin: Algorithm!
Blaise Pascal
A French inventor well known for his contributions to physics and mathematics was also the first to build a mechanical calculator called the Pascaline, a kind of precursor to the computer. A unit of pressure (Pa) and a programming language were named in his honor.
Charles Babbage
The father of the computer is a common name for this English polymath credited with the design of a mechanical computer, the analytical engine, with things like control flow and memory, essential features the modern computer.
The ones with the theory
George Boole
Programmers and electronic engineers have a lot to thank to this self-taught mathematician for developing Boolean algebra. Those bit operations, Boolean variables and logic gates will not be the same without his rules.
John von Neumann
Regarded as a genius for his ability to apply math and physics to solve very hard problems (including the Manhattan Project), this Hungarian scientist is a big name in computer science for defining the computer architecture we use to arrange our hardware components.
Alan Turing
Famous for breaking the Enigma machine code with an electromechanical computer, helping the allies in WWII and coming up with things like the Turing machine or the Turing test, popularised by the movie Blade Runner. He had a tragic ending, killing himself with a poisoned apple after being castrated as punishment for his homosexuality.
Claude Shannon
Another cryptanalysis hero in World War II that was only 21 years old when he wrote a thesis applying Boolean algebra to electronics. But his crown achievement was without a doubt his work on information theory with fundamental applications for sending data in telecommunications or calculating password strength with his entropy function.
The women
Ada Lovelace
Daughter of the poet Lord Byron, this English mathematician is considered to be the first computer programmer. Let me be clear: not the first woman programmer, the first person programmer. Ada published an algorithm that could be executed in Babbage’s analytical engine (if it had been build).
Grace Hopper
The programming world is filled with women like this admiral of the US Navy that was a key contributor in the development of early high-level programming languages like COBOL, widely use today in the banking sector. Fun fact, she was the recipient of the first Man of the Year award by the Data Processing Management Association.
Margaret Hamilton
That pile of papers in the photo is a printed version of the code written by this computer scientist for the on-board software for Apollo ships that put the first humans on the moon. She was a pioneer of making a career out of software engineering when that was not even a job.
Barbara Liskov
Experienced software developers may recognise his surname as it gives name to a quite useful design pattern known as the Liskov sustitution principle and other notable works in distributed computing.
The protectors of your data
Richard Hamming
Telecommunications have a lot to thank to this Bell Labs employee, also another member of the Manhattan Project, his invention of the Hamming code gives us the ability to keep data integrity when send over long distances.
Rivest Shamir Adleman
The creators of the first public key cryptosystem: RSA, that uses a property of prime numbers and an ingenuous protocol to cipher messages, the first use of public-key cryptography. Without this, money transactions over the Internet will be way less secure.
Diffie-Hellman
The Diffie-Hellman key exchange was the solution to sharing a secret in an insecure channel of communications, a problem that really needed solving if we want to start a private communication over the Internet.
The Freedom fighters
Ritchie and Thompson
This Bell Labs employees alongside Brian Kernighan develop the C programming language and lay the foundation for the free software movement with the creation of the Unix operating system. Other projects include languages like Go or B (a precursor to C) and the Plan 9 operating system.
Linus & Stallman 🐧
Richard Stallman is an activist, pioneer contributor of free software with the GNU Project and supporting the growth of concepts like copyleft, GPL and open source. Linus Tolvalds is a Finnish developer, creator of the Linux operating system and the popular version control system git.
The ones that made money (a lot)
Jobs vs Gates
Big money and big names that everyone knows due to their fight for market control. Steve Jobs co-founding Apple with Steve Wozniak, Pixar on his own and making himself a media figure and Bill Gates was able to be the wealthiest man alive for several years thanks to the success of Microsoft.
Bezos and Zuckerberg
Another two giant fortunes made with their respective companies. Apart from the big success of Amazon, Jeff Bezos is investing in cloud computing and Artificial Intelligence with his Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Facebook released several frameworks like React or GraphQL pushing the software industry forward.
Page and Brin
Founders of the big one: Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the fathers of a company synonymous with innovation. After solving the biggest problem in the era of information (searching for it) Google has not stop creating new quality products for every tech related necessity: communications, navigation, storage, translation, office tools, education, ads, shopping…
