Noteworthy Computer Scientists

Bill Gates

As the co-founder and former chief executive of Microsoft, the world's largest personal-computer software company, his name has become synonymous with computer science. He and his Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen started Microsoft in the Poker Room of the Currier House at Harvard University.

Yukihiro Matsumoto

Better known as "Matz," is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer. He is the chief designer of the Ruby programming language and the author of its reference implementation, his Ruby Interpreter. He is widely known throughout the industry for his positive demeanor, which is so well-received that it initiated a motto throughout the entire Ruby community: "Matz is nice and so we are nice" (MINASWAN).

Richard Stallman

Better known as RMS in the hacker world, is a computer programmer and software freedom activist. As a programmer, he is best known for launching the GNU Project, a Unix-like operating system composed of free software. He is also the founder of the Free Software Foundation, and campaigns regularly for software to be distributed to those who will then be able to use, study, and modify that software for free.

Sophie Wilson

British computer scientist best known for designing the Acorn Micro-Computer, the first computer sold by Acorn Computers, Ltd. in 1978. Three years later, she extended Acorn Atom's BASIC programming language, which enabled the company to win the business of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for their ambitious computer education project.

Brendan Eich

Creating the JavaScript programming language would be an impressive enough feat, but computer programmer and technologist, he is also the co-founder of the Mozilla Project, Mozilla Foundation, and Mozilla Corporation, best known for Firefox.

Linus Torvalds

Finnish-born computer scientist that is the creator of Linux, a popular open source operating system. Linux has been adapted into thousands of variations, and many web servers run using the system. He, who currently acts as Linux's project coordinator, is also the creator of Git, a revision control system, and Subsurface, a diving log software.

Rasmus Lerdorf

Greenland-born Computer scientist that is a Canadian computer programmer best known for creating PHP, a scripting language for which he also authorized the first two versions. More than 34% of today's internet websites run on PHP, making it one of the most successful programming languages in existence.

James Gosling

He is a software developer best known for his participation in the development of the popular Java programming language. He is generally credited with creating the original Java design, and implementing the original compiler and virtual machine.

Larry Wall

He decided to join the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It was with NASA in 1987 that Wall created the Perl programming language. Since then, he has continued to develop Perl, as well as authored RN Usenet client, a widely used patch program. He is currently employed full-time by O'Reilly Media, for whom he writes books on the subject of Perl.

Tim Berners-Lee

He is a British computer scientist who has single-handedly changed the course of human history. In 1989, he proposed a new information management system. A mere eight months later, he received the first successful communication from a Hypertext Transfer Protocol via the internet. Since then, his initial proposal, the World Wide Web, has become a vital part of nearly every household, business, school, and government in the world.

Brian Kernighan

He is a Canadian computer scientist best known for co-developing UNIX, a multitasking, multiuser computer operating system with a number of variants. On his own, he has authored quite a few programs including ditroff and cron for Version 7 UNIX. He is also credited with coining the phrase WYSIWYG ("What you see is what you get").

Bjarne Stroustrup

He is a Danish-born computer scientist who developed the popular C++ programming language. In fact, he literally wrote the book on C++; he is the author of the language's official textbook "The C++ Programming Language."

Guido van Rossum

He is a Dutch-born computer programmer best known as the author of the Python programming language. He continues to oversee Python's development and is known in the Python community as BDFL, or "Benevolent Dictator for Life."

Ben Goodger

He is a New Zealand-born British software engineer. After starting his career with the Netscape Communications Corporation, he began working with the Mozilla Foundation, where he was a lead developer of the popular Firefox web browser. Currently, he is a lead in the user experience department at Google, where his main focus is the continued development and success of Google Chrome.

Jason Fried

He is a co-founder and the current president of Basecamp, formerly known as 37signals, a Chicago-based web company that has developed thousands of apps. He (and Basecamp) is best known for inventing the popular Ruby on Rails programming language, which was initially meant for internal use at 37signals but released to the public in 2004.

John D. Carmack

He is a successful programmer of game software. He is the co-founder of id Software, and the current lead programmer of related id Computer Games, the company behind such popular games as Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and their sequels. He is best known for his innovations in 3D graphics, including "adaptive tile refresh," "raycasting," "binary space partitioning," "surface caching," "Carmack's Reverse," and "Mega Texture technology," among others.

Larry Page

He is an American business magnate and computer scientist best known for co-founding Google. He is the inventor of PageRank, the foundation of Google's search ranking algorithm and an important part of the company's initial success.

Douglas Crockford

He is an American programmer and entrepreneur who has successfully worked to popularize JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). He began his career as a senior JavaScript architect at Yahoo!, around which time he developed various JavaScript-related tools such as JSLint, JSMin.

John Resig

He is an entrepreneurial software engineer and developer of jQuery, the multi-browser JavaScript library which functions by simplifying the client-side of HTML. In addition to working as a JavaScript programmer, he is a published author, blogger, programmer for the Mozilla Corporation, and current application developer for the Khan Academy.

Nicklaus Wirth

He is best known as the designer of Pascal. A pioneer in the software engineering field, he has designed several other programming languages, including Algol W, Euler, Modula, Oberon, Oberon-2, and Oberon-7. He was awarded the prestigious Turing Award in 1987 for developing his sequence of innovative computer languages.

Donald Knuth

He is often considered the "father" of analysis of algorithms — a nickname which suggests that without Him, program languages may not have been what they are today. He, a Professor Emeritus of mathematics and computer science at Stanford University, created the WEB and CWEB programming systems, the TEX computer typesetting system, and the METAFONT font definition language and rendering system.

Mark Zuckerberg

He is the American computer programmer and internet entrepreneur responsible for developing Facebook in his Harvard dorm room. Facebook, Inc., for which he currently serves as CEO, has continued to grow exponentially since first moved the company to Palo Alto, California.

Sergey Brin

He is the co-founder of Google, one of the most profitable internet companies of all time. He is an American computer scientist who emigrated from the Soviet Union at age six. As a PhD student at Stanford University, He and his friend, Larry Page, crammed a bunch of cheap computers into their dorm room and developed a data mining system.

Michael Widenius

He is the creator of the original MySQL, an open-source database released to the public in 1996. He is the co-author of "MySQL Reference Manual" published by O'Reilly in 2002. In 2003, he was awarded the coveted Finnish Software Entrepreneur of the Year Prize.

Miguel de Icaza

He was awarded the Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software. This was quickly followed by the MIT Technology Review Innovator of the Year Award, and a spot on Time magazine's list of Innovators for the New Century. He is best known for creating the GNOME project, a free desktop environment which uses Linux.

Bram Cohen

His father was a computer scientist. He dropped out of college at SUNY Buffalo to work for several dot com companies. Eventually, he left to create BitTorrent, the first file-sharing program to use his own peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol.

Ken Thompson

Known as simply ken in hacker circles, he is considered a true pioneer in the world of computer science. As co-creator of UNIX, he also helped to create the B programming language, a direct predecessor to the modern C language. Since 2009, he has been working with Google developing the Go programming language.

Elon Musk

South African-born computer scientist that is best known as the business magnate, investor, and inventor responsible for founding companies like SpaceX, Tesla Motors, and SolarCity, and for his futuristic (and currently only hypothetical) high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop. But he makes this list because he is the designer of PayPal, the revolutionary online program through which users can pay bills, collect fees, manage purchases, and more.

David Axmark

Swedish-born computer scientist that is one of the founders of MySQL AB and a developer of MySQL, both of which are free database servers. He has been involved with free software since 1980, and has proven himself committed to developing the business model for free open-source software.

Carl Sassenrath

Thanks to him, our personal computers are able to multi-task. There, he created the Amiga Computer operating system kernel, from which the technologies for multi-tasking personal computers was developed. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer at REBOL Technologies, where he is working on developing an expression-based language which could ultimately provide a more efficient method of distributed computing.