1. Alan Turing
2. Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web and HTML. He was born in England and has an engineering background, through developing computer systems in the 80s. He is indeed a true pioneer in the field of Computer Science, and without Tim’s ideas and development work, we simply wouldn’t have the internet as we know it today.
Tim is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), where he currently oversees the development of the web. Also, Tim lectures at the University of Oxford, teaching computer science. Tim was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his contribution and named by Time magazine for being one of the most important and influential people of the 20th century.
3. John von Neumann
John von Neumann is a Hungarian-American computer scientist and mathematician, known for his work in pioneering the field of game theory. He contributed over 150 papers in his lifetime, spread out over Pure and Applied Mathematics, and other specialized topics. In World War II, John von Neumann also worked on the Manhattan Project, where he solved problems in the nuclear physics domain.
4. Woz
Steve Wozniak, or “Woz”, is the co-founder and original programmer Apple. He was the technical genius behind the company, helping to orchestrate and build Apple products and services. He invented Integer BASIC, the BASIC interpreter used for the original Apple I and Apple II platforms. Here is a sample of the code he has written showing his programming style. Unless you know BASIC, then this appears foreign to most. There’s no syntax highlighting or intelligent code completion in sight.
5. Dennis Ritchie
Dennis Ritchie is the co-creator of the C Programming language, the underpinning language for many software systems. It is used in many different industries and has inspired a whole series of programming languages (or C-like languages). The language is taught in computer science courses, inside Universities and educational institutions, is a foundational language for software developers.
Dennis was also the co-creator of Unix, a family of operating systems that were developed in the 1970s. Unix lead the way and became very popular for its features, by having a modular design, unified filesystem, and the Unix Shell (later developed into Bash). Unix was used by Apple in “MacOS", which maintains the largest amount of installations using Unix.
6. Brian Kernighan
Brian Kernighan is co-author the first C Programming book. The significance of the C Programming language is tremendous. Many have said that learning C is almost an essential in any software developer’s journey- a language that helps people to understand the building blocks of a computer. Brian has been a professor of the computer science division at Princeton University since the year 2000.
Brian was also contributed to the development of Unix, a family of operating systems that were released in the 1970s. Unix lead the way and became very popular for its features, by having a modular design, unified filesystem, and the Unix Shell (later developed into Bash). Unix was used by Apple in “MacOS”, which maintains the largest amount of installations using Unix.
7. Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds is the creator of the famous “Linux” kernel, the core of many operating systems, such as Chrome OS and Android. He is also the creator of “Git”, the version control system used heavily throughout the software development industry. Linus is a pioneer in the industry with his engineering mindset, and relentless ability to develop software systems.
8. James Gosling
James Gosling is the inventor of the Java programming language. He is a Canadian computer scientist and distinguished engineer at Amazon Web Services. His contributions to the field of computer science are phenomenal. Java is one of the most popular languages used in the software industry. It’s used throughout many organizations and software systems. Java was acquired by Oracle Corporation, to which it currently owns the rights to the programming language.
9. Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider
Joseph is the inventor of Cloud Computing, a computing paradigm that has taken over the world. Today’s largest companies, such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft have adopted Cloud Computing and have harnessed its power to create Cloud services. These services are used by other software systems to build applications that do not pose high storage costs and the need for local data centers. This is the forefront of modern technology and the software industry
10. John McCarthy
John McCarthy is the inventor of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was a computer scientist and cognitive scientist born in the United State of America, providing a significant contribution to the computer science industry with the topic of Artificial Intelligence. Additionally, he also created the Lisp programming language family and had influence over the design of the ALGOL language. He spent most of his career at the Stanford University and received a Turing Award for his contributions to the field of AI.
