Famous Computer Scientists?

[cos]

How many computer scientists or other important people in computing are famous enough that people outside the field know their names? Which ones?

If you're not and never have been a computer science or computer engineering major, or professional programmer or system administrator or something like that, please leave a comment naming anyone you think of as a famous computer scientist or important person in the history of computing? Or that you can't think of any, because maybe the answer is that none are well known enough to be known to most people here.

(If you are or have been one of those things, you could comment too, but state your background)

Edit:

1. People who are primarily engineers who made significant contributions to the field of computing count.

2. Leave a comment with what name come to mind (or that none do) before reading other comments. Repeats are great! Then I know several people thought of that name.

3. Steve Jobs is a good example of a name that comes to lots of people's minds in relation to computing but who is not the sort of person I'm asking about. He was an excellent entrepreneur and business leader who made very significant contributions to design as well - and I think its that which makes people mention him here. But what I'm looking for are famous people who made important technical or mathematical contributions and became well known because of that. Right from the start of Apple, Jobs was the one who saw the business opportunities and made them happen, not really the one who did the tech.

There's definitely a gray area there, because some people were important in the field of computing due in large part to how they shaped the field, perhaps by making computing usable in new ways, and it gets fuzzy in some of those cases, so I want to bring up Jobs as an illustration of the "not what I'm asking about" side of that fuzzy zone.

Comments

[jered]

I've got a CS background.

Scientists tend not to get very famous -- I assume you are talking about people who are actual scientists rather than engineers or business professionals. For example, Bill Gates is technically a computer scientist, but he is famous as a businessman. In that same sort of list, we can include big names like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, etc. CEOs and the like tend to be known outside of their technical field.

If you're focusing on scientists and are looking for the Charles Darwin's of the CS world, I think the list is a bit sparse. Alan Turing may have enough mystery around him to be famous. Mathematicians may know Don Knuth? The problem with CS as science is two-fold -- first, it's a field that's only around 50 years old. Second, there are very few actual computer scientists --- almost all of us with CS degrees (myself included) are engineers, not scientists.

[ron_newman]

Is Elon Musk a well-known name? I had never heard of him and had to look him up in Wikipedia.

My list would be Alan Turing and Charles Babbage. Maybe add in Ada Lovelace.

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

The only two I can think of who I don't first think of as entrepreneurs are Turing and Lovelace. It's funny because I know Lovelace worked with someone else and he's more famous, but I can't think of his name.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

Yup, that was my list - Turing and Lovelace. I might have thought of a couple of others if I had given myself more than 2 minutes before reading the comments. I am not a CS person.

Stream of consciousness.

[jadasc.livejournal.com]

Ada Lovelace. Alan Turing. Tim Berners-Lee. Bill Gates. Steve Wozniak. Steve Jobs (though I know he's not actually a programming person.) Richard Stallman.

[477150n.livejournal.com]

Emmy Noether, Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Alan Turing

That's about it off the top of my head. I'm sure I spelled some wrong.

[477150n.livejournal.com]

Looking it up, I think I'm confusing Emmy Noether with Ada Lovelace. Noether seems to have done more theoretical work.

[merlinsquill.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think my list is Turing and Lovelace.

[greenlily.livejournal.com]

I'm about as far from having a CS background as you can possibly get and still technically be a nerd, so. (Hanging around with CS majors a lot, and getting yelled at by Myrna for a semester as a work-study student in the CS Department office, does not count as a CS background.)

Offhand, the only ones I can think of are Alan Turing, Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. And I only know those last two because a certain sometime roommate really likes the webcomic.

[ron_newman]

I didn't know there was a webcomic. Can you link to it?

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I guess I'd say I'm a casual coder. I can't realistically apply for pure programming or sysadmin gigs even though my job does involve programming because I only know sort of lightweight, domain specific languages and I don't know them very well.

Programmers or I guess other computationally important people offhand -- not checking my work, hopefully I don't get too many names wrong.

Ada Lovelace
Don Knuth
Alan Turing
Linus Torvalds
Richard Stallman? He's at least an important computery malcontent, it seems to me.
Charles Babbage maybe?
Do we count Steve Jobs? Bill Gates? Sergei Brin and Larry Page?
What about the WWW guy -- Swiss resident, three names? Was it Tim Berners-Lee?
And of course there's Bruce Schneier if you consider security & cryptography part of computer science. Which I guess you'd have to? Maybe?

Part of what's hard is that the line between computer science and other things feels like it is getting fuzzier because computers are such important tools for everybody. It may be that this is not the case in strictly academic computer science, but I have little contact with that world except through friends.

[cos]

See my edit of the original post, regarding that fuzzy line. I'm drawing it much further out than pure computer science. My impression, borne out I think by most of the comments here, is that this fuzzy line stuff is something that people more familiar with the field will think about, because they (you) actually think about what these maybe-famous people did; people less familiar with the field will remember names but won't really know their work so they won't think about the fuzziness of whether they count or not. However, they will name some business leaders who *I* won't count, since they're only famous for their business/entrepreneurial contributions.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

I have hung out with CS people half my life and took a single course in Java in college, but that's the extent of my CS knowledge.

Famous names off the top of my head: Alan Turing, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Ada Lovelace.

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Data point: Turing and Lovelace were the only 2 entries on my instant mental list, too.

After that, I start going "The guy who wrote C!" (I had to look it up: Dennis Ritchie) and "The guy who wrote TeX, what was his name, at Stanford, um!" (Don Knuth). :-)

[awfief.livejournal.com]

/me giggles. Of course, for you, Don Knuth's claim to fame is writing TeX. :D (for me, it's his Dancing Links paper)

[pekmez.livejournal.com]

Technically I didn't get a CS degree or ever have a purely software job, but I did declare a 2nd major in CS (because I couldn't declare a minor in it)
and I did for a few years have "software / design engineer" as my job title.

Grace Hopper and Alan Turing are the first two who come to mind for me.

[marphod.livejournal.com]

CS degree/Software engineer.

Famous computer _scientists_? The top four that might be known, in no particular order: Turing, Knuth, Lovelace, Berners-Lee.

Steve Jobs was a designer, Woz is a technphile and engineer, Gates was an engineer and is a Business mogal. Torvalds, Zuckerberg, Musk, et al, are/were engineers as well.

Schnieder and Stalman are blow-hards, but they do science. Sure. Maybe semi-famous.

Maybe Tim O'Reilly, but he's known for his publishing house, not his scientific work. Maybe Peter Norton (I'd probably call him an Engineer, rather than a Scientist, but that's debatable), but that's only after-a-fashion.

Possibly Ellison; he's known for being CEO of Oracle, but he does have some theoretical background in there.

There is a random chance that someone out of field might have heard of Kenighan, Ritchie, or Stroustrup, but that's about it.

[lindseykuper]

Thinking back to before I had any CS education, I'd heard of Doug Hofstadter. Of course, he wouldn't identify himself as a computer scientist today, but he was a CS professor at my school at the time Gödel, Escher, Bach was published. (After it was published, he got famous enough to eschew silly things like departmental affiliations.)

[missionista.livejournal.com]

So, I'm not now and have never been a professional geek, but lord knows I hang out with enough of them. So bear that in mind with my answers. The very first two that came to mind were Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace. I thought of some other people who are not direclty computer scientists, but I think are related--Nikola Tesla, and I thought of one ohter, but now it escapes me. Then I thought of the modern biggies--Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

[whipchick.livejournal.com]

Alan Turing.

Babbage - the guy who invented the differential thing, and I only know it because of the grade 7 mnemonic, "Babbage makes a difference!"

Steve Jobs
Paul Allen
Bill Gates
Mark Zuckerman - though he's not a scientist, I'd argue that he has massively altered how we USE computers.

[whipchick.livejournal.com]

When I scrolled back up the comments, I've also heard of Steve Wozniak and Linus Torvalds but I can't think why. Ada Lovelace sounds a little familiar, too.

[rightkindofme.livejournal.com]

I went to school with Wozniac's kids. So I guess it was silly of me to forget his name. Thanks for the reminder. :)

[blimix.livejournal.com]

(My background is probably halfway to being a computer person: A brief stint programming professionally, though I continue to program recreationally, and incomplete college education involving computers among other things.)

My very first thought was Marvin Minsky. (After that, it's others who have already been covered here.)

[cos]

> After that, it's others who have already been covered here.

It is highly relevant that you had them in mind regardless of whether other people already had them in mind. Someone who's actually famous will come to mind for multiple people. If everyone omitted any name that someone else had already mentioned, there would be no way to view these responses usefully.

[rightkindofme.livejournal.com]

Grace Hopper! Err, that's the only one I can remember off the top of my head. Former English teacher. :)

[gosling.livejournal.com]

I had a picture of her in my classroom by the kids' computer when I was a preschool teacher.

She was the only one I could think of either right off the top of my head, although I recognized about eighty percent of the ones other people named and in most cases had some clue what they had done. My background is in education, and huge numbers of my friends have a computer science background (or current employment) so I feel like I should have been able to name a lot more.

[thatsmyval.livejournal.com]

TURING!

And then those other guys... You know, the ones we buy stuff from like Gates and Jobs, etc.
(these are not topics i feel comfy in.)

[catamethyst.livejournal.com]

Mostly Turing. Everybody loves Turing.
Does Steve Wozniak count?

[maebeth.livejournal.com]

no cs background

turing

and what (i think) i know is that he was gay and may have appeared in a stephenson novel. i don't know what he did .

[hermitgeecko.livejournal.com]

Alan Turing comes promptly to mind. Also Conway (as in Conway's Game of Life) and Moore (as in Moore's Law), though I can't remember either of their first names.

Cheating by checking Wikipedia informs me that they are John Conway and Gordon Moore. It also informs me that Conway was a mathematician rather than a programmer, but... eh, close enough in this case.

I've never been a professional programmer, but I do program.

[hermitgeecko.livejournal.com]

Oof, I forgot Lovelace and Babbage? I have a sad.

[ron_newman]

Alan Kay ought to be on any such list, but I doubt many people outside the field know who he is or why his work was so important.

(and I forgot to say earlier: I'm an MIT CS major)

[wotw]

First names that pop to mind: John von Neumann, Donald Knuth, Edsger Dijkstra, Scott Aaronson, Shafi Goldwasser, Dana Scott, Martin Minsky, Rivest, Shamir, Adelman, John McCarthy, Judea Pearl. All of that was typed without looking at the other comments; now that I've looked at them, I'm shocked that I overlooked Turing.

[wotw]

Also Alonzo Church, Alfred Tarski, Kurt Godel, Emil Post.

[bike4fish.livejournal.com]

I've a Ph.D. in computer science.

Two people I've hung out with who should be on everyone's lists are Doug Engelbart, who invented the mouse and was a pioneer in hypertext, and Ted Nelson, who coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia".

Englebart's "Mother of all Demos" shows off technologies that we all take for granted today - but the demo was in 1968.

[sauergeek.livejournal.com]

I have a CS degree, have been a programmer professionally, and am now a system administrator professionally.

The names I came up with before reading the comments, as names non CS people might know:

Alan Turing
Charles Babbage
Grace Hopper
Bill Gates (Unlike Jobs, Gates is actually a techie.)
Sergey Brin
Larry Page

And, after reading the comments, one more:

Larry Ellison, though people may know of him because of his wealth rather than his background.