Mar. 12th, 2013 10:03
Famous Computer Scientists?
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cosHow 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.
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.
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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.