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

[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.