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.

[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.

[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.

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.

[jered]

SpaceX has been front-page news, with Musk on CNN, MSNBC, etc, etc. I think not-computer-science people have a chance of recognizing him. CSers probably don't care about financial markets or world news. :-)

[ron_newman]

SpaceX is a cool project, but I don't think of it as related to computer science at all. So I don't know why he'd be in a list of well-known computer folks.

[jered]

Because he made all his money with PayPal.

[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.

[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.

[477150n.livejournal.com]

Pre-googling: Babbage. The Babbage engine. Charles, I think?

Post-googling: yep. Charles Babbage. So, that name was in my brain somewhere.

Edit: Oh, never mind, someone said it above, I probably saw it when I was skimming the comments.

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I Googled it after posting too, and thought, "I really should have remembered that!"

[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.

[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). :-)

[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.

[kirin]

It's surely this one: http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/

The site is a wordpress that's not really laid out well for browsing when new to the comic, so you may want to try the "stories" link.

[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.