Computer Scientist (Computer lessons SY 2015-2016)

Scientist Name/Origin Birth/Death

Contributions
John Vincent Atanasoff
(American)

October
4, 1903
June
15,
1995

was an American physicist and inventor

of the first automatic electronic digital
computer. His special-purpose machine
has come to be called the Atanasoff
Berry Computer

Charles Babbage
(English )

26
Decemb
er
1791
18
October
1871

was an English mathematician,

philosopher, inventor and mechanical
engineer who originated the concept of
a programmable computer. Considered
a "father of the computer" Babbage is
credited with inventing the first
mechanical computer that eventually
led to more complex designs.

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee

( British )

(born 8
June
1955
Present

an English computer scientist, MIT

professor and the inventor of the World
Wide Web. he implemented the first
successful communication between a
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
client and server via the Internet.

Douglas Carl Engelbart

(American)

born
January
30,
1925

is an American inventor, and an early

computer and internet pioneer. He is
best known for his work on the
challenges of human-computer
interaction, resulting in the invention of
the computer mouse, and the
development of hypertext, networked
computers, and precursors to GUIs.

Herman Hollerith
(American )

Februar
y 29,
1860
Novemb
er 17,
1929

was an American statistician who

developed a mechanical tabulator
based on punched cards to rapidly
tabulate statistics from millions of
pieces of data. He was the founder of
one of the companies that later merged
and became IBM.

Rear Admiral Grace Murray

Hopper (American)

Decemb
er 9,
1906
January
1, 1992

was an American computer scientist

and United States Navy officer. A
pioneer in the field, she was one of the
first programmers of the Harvard Mark I
computer, and developed the first
compiler for a computer programming
language.
She conceptualized the idea of
machine-independent programming
languages, which led to the
development of COBOL, one of the first
modern programming languages. She
is credited with popularizing the term
"debugging" for fixing computer
glitches (motivated by an actual moth
removed from the computer, and not
by her)

Augusta Ada King,

Countess of Lovelace /
Augusta Ada Byron
(British)

10
Decemb
er 1815
- 27
Novemb
er 1852

was an English mathematician and

writer chiefly known for her work on
Charles Babbage's early mechanical
general-purpose computer, the
analytical engine. Her notes on the
engine include what is recognised as
the first algorithm intended to be
processed by a machine; thanks to this,
she is sometimes considered the
world's first computer programmer.

Claude Elwood Shannon

(American)

April 30,
1916
Februar
y 24,
2001

was an American mathematician,

electronic engineer, and cryptographer
known as "the father of information
theory".

Alan Mathison Turing

(British )

23 June
1912
7 June
1954

Konrad Zuse ( German)

1910
1995

Shannon is famous for having founded

information theory with one landmark
paper published in 1948. But he is also
credited with founding both digital
computer and digital circuit design
theory in 1937, when, as a 21-year-old
master's student at MIT
was an English mathematician,
logician, cryptanalyst, and computer
scientist. He was highly influential in
the development of computer science,
providing a formalisation of the
concepts of "algorithm" and
"computation" with the Turing machine,
which played a significant role in the
creation of the modern computer.
Turing is widely considered to be the
father of computer science and artificial
intelligence.
was a German civil engineer and
computer pioneer. His greatest

achievement was the world's first

functional program-controlled Turingcomplete computer, the Z3, which
became operational in May 1941.

George Robert Stibitz

(American)

April 30,
1904
January
31,
1995

is internationally recognized as one of

the fathers of the modern first digital
computer. He was a Bell Labs
researcher known for his work in the
1930s and 1940s on the realization of
Boolean logic digital circuits using
electromechanical relays as the
switching element.

Marc Lowell Andreessen

(American)

July 9,
1971

is an American entrepreneur, venture

capitalist, software engineer, and multimillionaire best known as co-author of
Mosaic, the first widely-used web
browser, and co-founder of Netscape
Communications Corporation.

Blaise Pascal (French)

19 June
1623
19
August
1662

He is one of only six inductees in the

World Wide Web Hall of Fame
announced at the first international
conference on the World Wide Web in
1994.
was a French mathematician, physicist,
inventor, writer and Catholic
philosopher.
n 1642, while still a teenager, he
started some pioneering work on
calculating machines, and after three
years of effort and 50 prototypes he
invented the mechanical calculator. He
built twenty of these machines called
the Pascaline

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

(German)

July 1,
1646
Novemb
er 14,
1716

John Adam Presper Eckert

Jr. (Amercican)

April 9,
1919
June 3,
1995

was a German mathematician and

philosopher.
He became one of the most prolific
inventors in the field of mechanical
calculators. While working on adding
automatic multiplication and division to
Pascal's calculator, he was the first to
describe a pinwheel calculator in 1685
and invented the Leibniz wheel, used in
the arithmometer, the first massproduced mechanical calculator. He
also refined the binary number system,
which is at the foundation of virtually
all digital computers.
was an American electrical engineer
and computer pioneer. With John
Mauchly he invented the first generalpurpose electronic digital computer
(ENIAC), presented the first course in
computing topics (the Moore School
Lectures), founded the first commercial
computer company (the Eckert
Mauchly Computer Corporation), and
designed the first commercial computer
in the U.S., the UNIVAC, which
incorporated Eckert's invention of the
mercury delay line memory.

Joseph Marie Jacquard (French

)

7 July
1752
7
August
1834

was a French weaver and merchant. He

played an important role in the
development of the earliest
programmable loom (the "Jacquard
loom"), which in turn played an
important role in the development of
other programmable machines, such as
computers.

George Boole (British)

2
Novemb
er 1815
8
Decemb
er 1864

was an English-born mathematician

and logician. His work was in the fields
of differential equations and algebraic
logic, and he is now best known as the
author of The Laws of Thought. As the
inventor of the prototype of what is
now called Boolean logic, which
became the basis of the modern digital
computer, Boole is regarded in
hindsight as a founder of the field of
computer science.

Steven Paul Jobs (American)

Februar
y 24,
1955
October
5, 2011

was an American businessman,

designer and inventor. He is best
known as the co-founder, chairman,
and chief executive officer of Apple Inc.
Through Apple, he was widely
recognized as a charismatic pioneer of
the personal computer revolution[7][8]
and for his influential career in the
computer and consumer electronics
fields. Jobs also co-founded and served
as chief executive of Pixar Animation
Studios; he became a member of the
board of directors of The Walt Disney
Company in 2006, when Disney
acquired Pixar.

William Henry Gates III

(American)

October
28,
1955

is an American business magnate,

computer programmer and
philanthropist. Gates is the former chief
executive and current chairman of
Microsoft, the worlds largest personalcomputer software company.
He is consistently ranked among the
world's wealthiest people and was the
wealthiest overall from 1995 to 2009,
excluding 2008, when he was ranked
third.