FREE COMPUTING HISTORY · 1943–1951
Systems and silicon scale
Databases, networks, processors, operating systems, and software businesses grow into platforms.
1943–1951
Databases, networks, processors, operating systems, and software businesses grow into platforms.
- Michael Stonebraker: Ingres; PostgreSQL; VoltDB; C-Store/Vertica; NewSQL; Turing Award; the most influential DB researcher alive
- Charles Bennett: Reversible computing; quantum teleportation; quantum cryptography; Maxwell's demon resolution
- Bill Gosper: Gosper's algorithm; Game of Life patterns; continued fractions; MIT AI Lab hacker
- Andrew Tanenbaum: MINIX (inspired Linux); networking textbooks; distributed systems
- Whitfield Diffie: Co-invented public-key cryptography (1976)
- Jim Gray: Transaction processing; ACID properties; data cube; five-minute rule; Turing Award
- Larry Ellison: Co-founded Oracle: enterprise relational database dominance
- James H. Clark: Founded SGI; founded Netscape; geometry engine; 3D graphics pioneer
- Adele Goldberg: Smalltalk-80 co-developer; wrote definitive Smalltalk books; PARC learning research
- Martin Hellman: Co-invented public-key cryptography (1976)
- Leonard Adleman: RSA algorithm (the "A"); DNA computing pioneer
- Takeo Kanade: Lucas-Kanade optical flow; face detection; 3D vision; autonomous vehicles pioneer
- Ed Catmull: Co-founded Pixar; texture mapping; Z-buffer; subdivision surfaces; Creativity, Inc.
- Edmund Clarke: Model checking co-inventor; formal verification; Turing Award (2007)
- Robert Metcalfe: Ethernet; Metcalfe's Law
- Terry Winograd: SHRDLU natural language system; influenced HCI; advised Larry Page
- Joseph Sifakis: Model checking co-inventor; formal verification; Turing Award (2007)
- Geoffrey Hinton: Backpropagation; deep belief networks; Boltzmann machines; capsule networks; "Godfather of Deep Learning"
- Ronald Rivest: RSA (the "R"); MD5; RC4; RC5; election security
- David Patterson: RISC (SPARC/RISC-V); RAID; Computer Architecture; great ideas in computer architecture
- Gerald Jay Sussman: Scheme; SICP; constraint propagation; electrical engineering education
- Hal Abelson: SICP co-author; Creative Commons co-founder; open courseware pioneer
- James Rumbaugh: UML co-creator; OMT methodology; Rational Software
- Yuri Matiyasevich: Solved Hilbert's 10th problem (MRDP theorem); Diophantine equations
- Ray Kurzweil: OCR; speech recognition; The Singularity Is Near; Google AI
- Leonid Levin: NP-completeness (independent of Cook); Levin's universal search; one-way functions
- Nancy Lynch: Distributed algorithms; FLP impossibility result; Distributed Algorithms textbook
- László Lovász: Graph theory; Lovász Local Lemma; lattice basis reduction (LLL algorithm); combinatorial optimization
- Leslie Valiant: PAC learning theory; #P-completeness; holographic algorithms; Valiant model
- Ward Cunningham: Invented the wiki (WikiWikiWeb, 1995); Agile Manifesto signatory
- Bob Frankston: Co-created VisiCalc
- Marc Raibert: Founded Boston Dynamics; legged locomotion; dynamic balance robots
- Jim Blinn: Blinn-Phong shading; bump mapping; Jim Blinn's Corner; JPL Voyager animations
- Christos Papadimitriou: Computational complexity; algorithmic game theory; Computational Complexity textbook
- Douglas Lenat: Cyc project; AM; Eurisko; symbolic AI; common sense reasoning
- Bjarne Stroustrup: C++: OOP for systems programming; "C with Classes"
- Steve Wozniak: Apple I and Apple II hardware design
- Van Jacobson: TCP congestion control (Jacobson's algorithm); saved the Internet from congestion collapse (1988)
- Joe Armstrong: Created Erlang: fault-tolerant, concurrent, distributed systems (telecom/messaging backbone)
- Dan Bricklin: Co-created VisiCalc: first spreadsheet