List of computer scientists

This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

This is a list of computer scientists, people who do work in computer science, in particular researchers and authors.

Some persons notable as programmers are included here because they work in research as well as program. A few of these people pre-date the invention of the digital computer; they are now regarded as computer scientists because their work can be seen as leading to the invention of the computer. Others are mathematicians whose work falls within what would now be called theoretical computer science, such as complexity theory and algorithmic information theory.

A

• Wil van der Aalst – business process management, process mining, Petri nets
• Hal Abelson – intersection of computing and teaching
• Serge Abiteboul – database theory
• Samson Abramsky – game semantics
• Leonard Adleman – RSA, DNA computing
• Manindra Agrawal – polynomial-time primality testing
• Luis von Ahn – human-based computation
• Alfred Aho – compilers book, the 'a' in AWK
• Frances E. Allen – compiler optimization
• Gene Amdahl – supercomputer developer, founder of Amdahl Corporation
• Andrew Appel – compilers text books
• Bruce Arden – programming language compilers (GAT, MAD), virtual memory architecture, MTS
• Sanjeev Arora – PCP theorem
• John Vincent Atanasoff – computer pioneer
• Ali Aydar – computer scientist and CEO of Sporcle

B

• Charles Babbage (1791–1871) – invented first mechanical computer
• Charles Bachman
• Roland Carl Backhouse – mathematics of program construction
• John Backus – FORTRAN, Backus–Naur form, first complete compiler
• David A. Bader
• Anthony James Barr – SAS System
• Jean Bartik (1924–2011) – one of the first computer programmers, on ENIAC (1946), one of first Vacuum tube computers, back when "programming" involved using cables, dials, and switches to physically rewire the machine; worked with John Mauchly toward BINAC (1949), EDVAC (1949), UNIVAC (1951) to develop early "stored program" computers
• Andrew Barto
• Rudolf Bayer – B-tree
• James C. Beatty, Jr. – compiler optimization, super-computing
• Gordon Bell (born 1931) – computer designer DEC VAX, author: Computer Structures
• Steven M. Bellovin – network security
• Tim Berners-Lee – World Wide Web
• Daniel J. Bernstein – qmail, software as protected speech
• Peter Bernus
• Dines Bjørner – Vienna Development Method (VDM), RAISE
• Gerrit Blaauw – one of the principal designers of the IBM System 360 line of computers
• David Blei
• Manuel Blum – cryptography
• Barry Boehm – software engineering economics, spiral development
• Kurt Bollacker
• Jeff Bonwick - inventor of slab allocation and ZFS
• Grady Booch – Unified Modeling Language, Object Management Group
• George Boole – Boolean logic
• Bert Bos – Cascading Style Sheets
• Jonathan Bowen – Z notation, formal methods
• Stephen R. Bourne – Bourne shell, portable ALGOL 68C compiler
• Robert S. Boyer – string searching, ACL2 theorem prover
• Jack E. Bresenham – early computer-graphics contributions, including Bresenham's algorithm
• David J. Brown – unified memory architecture, binary compatibility
• Per Brinch Hansen (surname "Brinch Hansen") – concurrency
• Sjaak Brinkkemper – methodology of product software development
• Fred Brooks – System 360, OS/360, The Mythical Man-Month, No Silver Bullet
• Rod Brooks
• Michael Butler – Event-B

C

• Tracy Camp - wireless computing
• Martin Campbell-Kelly – history of computing
• Bryan Cantrill - inventor of DTrace
• Luca Cardelli – objects
• Edwin Catmull – computer graphics
• Vinton Cerf – Internet, TCP/IP
• Gregory Chaitin
• Zhou Chaochen – duration calculus
• Peter Chen – entity-relationship model, data modeling, conceptual model
• Alonzo Church – mathematics of combinators, lambda calculus
• Edmund M. Clarke – model checking
• John Cocke – RISC
• Edgar F. Codd (1923–2003) – formulated the database relational model
• Simon Colton – computational creativity
• Paul Justin Compton – Ripple Down Rules
• Gordon Cormack – co-inventor of dynamic Markov compression
• Stephen Cook – NP-completeness
• James Cooley – Fast Fourier transform (FFT)
• Fernando J. Corbató – Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), Multics
• Patrick Cousot – abstract interpretation
• Ingemar Cox - digital watermarking
• Seymour Cray – Cray Research, supercomputer
• Nello Cristianini – Machine learning, pattern analysis, artificial intelligence
• W. Bruce Croft
• Haskell Curry

D

• Ole-Johan Dahl – Simula
• Ryan Dahl - founder of node.js project
• Andries van Dam – computer graphics, hypertext
• Christopher J. Date – proponent of database relational model
• Erik Demaine – computational origami
• Tom DeMarco
• Richard DeMillo – computer security, software engineering, educational technology
• Dorothy E. Denning – computer security
• Peter J. Denning – identified the use of an operating system's working set and balance set, President of ACM
• Michael Dertouzos – Director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) from 1974 to 2001
• Alexander Dewdney
• Vinod Dham – P5 Pentium processor
• Jan Dietz (1945 -ι) – information systems theory and "Design & Engineering Methodology for Organizations"
• Whitfield Diffie (1944-χ) – Public key cryptography, Diffie–Hellman key exchange,
• Edsger Dijkstra – algorithms, Goto considered harmful, semaphore (programming)
• Alan Dix – literally wrote the book on human–computer interaction
• Jack Dongarra – linear algebra high performance computing (HCI)
• Marco Dorigo – ant colony optimization
• Paul Dourish – human computer interaction
• Charles Stark Draper (1901–1987) – designer: Apollo Guidance Computer, "Father of inertial navigation", MIT Professor.
• Susan Dumais – Information Retrieval
• Adam Dunkels – Protothreads

E

• Annie J. Easley
• Wim Ebbinkhuijsen – COBOL
• John Presper Eckert – ENIAC
• Brendan Eich – JavaScript, Mozilla
• Philip-Emeagwali – supercomputing
• E. Allen Emerson – model checking
• Douglas Engelbart – tiled windows, hypertext, computer mouse
• Andrey Ershov
• Don Estridge (1937–1985) – led development of original IBM Personal Computer (PC); known as "father of the IBM PC"
• Oren Etzioni - MetaCrawler, Netbot
• Christopher Riche Evans
• David C. Evans – computer graphics
• Shimon Even

F

• Scott Fahlman
• Edward Feigenbaum – intelligence
• Edward Felten – computer security
• Tim Finin
• Raphael Finkel
• Donald Firesmith
• Gary William Flake
• Tommy Flowers – Colossus computer
• Robert Floyd – NP-completeness
• James D. Foley
• Ken Forbus
• Lance Fortnow
• Martin Fowler
• Herbert W. Franke
• Yoav Freund
• Daniel P. Friedman
• Ping Fu

G

• Richard Gabriel
• Zvi Galil
• Bernard Galler – MAD (programming language)
• Hector Garcia-Molina
• Michael Garey – NP-completeness
• Hugo de Garis
• David Gelernter
• Charles Geschke
• Zoubin Ghahramani
• Lee Giles - CiteSeer
• Seymour Ginsburg – formal languages, automata theory, AFL theory, database theory
• Robert L. Glass
• Kurt Gödel – computability – not a computer scientist per se, but his work was invaluable in the field
• Joseph Goguen
• Adele Goldberg – Smalltalk
• Ian Goldberg – cryptographer, off-the-record messaging
• Oded Goldreich – cryptography, computational complexity theory
• Shafi Goldwasser – cryptography, computational complexity theory
• Gene Golub – Matrix computation
• Martin Charles Golumbic – algorithmic graph theory
• James Gosling – NeWS, Java
• Paul Graham – Viaweb, On Lisp, Arc
• Robert M. Graham – programming language compilers (GAT, MAD), virtual memory architecture, Multics
• Susan L. Graham – compilers, programming environments
• Jim Gray – database
• Sheila Greibach – Greibach normal form, AFL theory
• Ralph Griswold – SNOBOL
• Bill Gropp – Message Passing Interface, PETSc
• Tom Gruber
• Ramanathan V. Guha – RDF, Netscape, RSS, Epinions
• Neil J. Gunther – computer performance analysis, capacity planning
• Peter G. Gyarmati – adaptivity in operating systems and networking

H

• Philipp Matthäus Hahn – mechanical calculator
• Eldon C. Hall – Apollo Guidance Computer
• Wendy Hall
• Joseph Halpern
• Richard Hamming – Hamming code, founder of the Association for Computing Machinery
• Jiawei Han – Data mining
• Juris Hartmanis – computational complexity theory
• Johan Håstad – computational complexity theory
• Les Hatton – software failure and vulnerabilities
• He Jifeng – provably correct systems
• Martin Hellman – encryption
• Gernot Heiser – Development of L4 and founder of OK Labs
• James Hendler – Semantic Web
• John L. Hennessy – computer architecture
• Andrew Herbert
• Danny Hillis – Connection Machine
• Geoffrey Hinton
• C. A. R. Hoare – Logic, rigor, Communicating sequential processes (CSP)
• John Henry Holland – genetic algorithms
• Herman Hollerith (1860–1929) – invented recording of data on a machine readable medium, using punched cards
• John Hopcroft – compilers
• Admiral Grace Hopper (1906–1992) – developed early compilers: FLOW-Matic, COBOL; worked on UNIVAC; gave speeches on computer history, where when gave out nano-seconds
• Eric Horvitz – artificial intelligence
• Alston Householder
• David A. Huffman (1925–1999) – Huffman coding, used in data compression.
• John Hughes – structuring computations with arrows; QuickCheck randomized program testing framework; Haskell programming language design.
• Watts Humphrey (1927–2010) – Personal Software Process (PSP), Software quality, Team Software Process (TSP)

I

• Jean Ichbiah – Ada
• Dan Ingalls – Bit blit, Lively Kernel
• Kenneth E. Iverson – APL, J

J

• Ivar Jacobson – Unified Modeling Language, Object Management Group
• Ramesh Jain
• Jonathan James
• David S. Johnson
• Stephen C. Johnson
• Cliff Jones – Vienna Development Method (VDM)
• Michael I. Jordan
• Aravind K. Joshi
• Bill Joy (born 1954) – Sun Microsystems, BSD UNIX, vi, csh

K

• William Kahan – numerical analysis
• Robert E. Kahn – TCP/IP
• Avinash Kak – digital image processing
• Poul-Henning Kamp - inventor of GBDE, FreeBSD Jails, Varnish cache
• David Karger
• Richard Karp – NP-completeness
• Narendra Karmarkar – Karmarkar's algorithm
• Marek Karpinski – NP optimization problems
• Alan Kay – Dynabook, Smalltalk, overlapping windows
• Neeraj Kayal - AKS primality test
• John George Kemeny – BASIC
• Ken Kennedy – compiling for parallel and vector machines
• Brian Kernighan (born 1942) – Unix, the 'k' in AWK
• Carl Kesselman – grid computing
• Gregor Kiczales – CLOS, reflection, aspect-oriented programming
• Stephen Cole Kleene – Kleene closure, recursion theory
• Dan Klein – Natural language processing, Machine translation
• Leonard Kleinrock – ARPANET, queueing theory, packet switching, hierarchical routing
• Donald Knuth – The Art of Computer Programming, MIX/MMIX, TeX, literate programming
• Andrew Koenig – C++
• Daphne Koller – Artificial intelligence, bayesian network
• Michael Kölling – BlueJ
• Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov – algorithmic complexity theory
• Janet L. Kolodner – case-based reasoning
• David Korn – Korn shell
• Vassilis Kostakos
• Kees Koster – ALGOL 68
• Robert Kowalski – logic programming
• John Koza – genetic programming
• John Krogstie – SEQUAL framework
• Joseph Kruskal – Kruskal's algorithm
• Thomas E. Kurtz (born 1928) – BASIC programming language; Dartmouth College computer professor

L

• Monica S. Lam
• Leslie Lamport – algorithms for distributed computing, LaTeX
• Butler W. Lampson
• Peter J. Landin
• Tom Lane
• Börje Langefors
• Steve Lawrence
• Edward D. Lazowska
• Joshua Lederberg
• Manny M Lehman – Laws of Software Evolution
• Charles E. Leiserson – cache-oblivious algorithms, provably good work-stealing, coauthor of Introduction to Algorithms
• Douglas Lenat – artificial intelligence, Cyc
• Yann LeCun
• Rasmus Lerdorf – PHP
• Max Levchin – Gausebeck-Lechin Test and PayPal
• Leonid Levin – computational complexity theory
• Kevin Leyton-Brown – artificial intelligence
• J.C.R. Licklider
• David Liddle
• John Lions – Lions Book
• Richard J. Lipton – computational complexity theory
• Barbara Liskov – programming languages
• Ada Lovelace – first programmer
• Nancy Lynch

M

• Zohar Manna – fuzzy logic
• James Martin – information engineering
• Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) – Software craftsmanship
• John Mashey
• Yuri Matiyasevich – solving Hilbert's tenth problem
• Yukihiro Matsumoto – Ruby (programming language)
• John Mauchly (1907–1980) – designed ENIAC, first general-purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer; worked with Jean Bartik on ENIAC and Grace Murray Hopper on UNIVAC
• John McCarthy – Lisp (programming language), artificial intelligence
• Andrew McCallum
• Douglas McIlroy – pipes
• Chris McKinstry – artificial intelligence, Mindpixel
• Marshall Kirk McKusick – BSD, Berkeley Fast File System
• Lambert Meertens – ALGOL 68, ABC (programming language)
• Bertrand Meyer – Eiffel (programming language)
• Silvio Micali – cryptography
• Robin Milner – ML (programming language)
• Marvin Minsky – artificial intelligence, perceptrons, Society of Mind
• Tom M. Mitchell
• Paul Mockapetris – Domain Name System (DNS)
• Cleve Moler – numerical analysis, MATLAB
• Edward F. Moore – Moore machine
• Gordon Moore – Moore's law
• J Strother Moore – string searching, ACL2 theorem prover
• Hans Moravec – robotics
• Robert Tappan Morris – Morris worm
• Joel Moses – Macsyma
• Rajeev Motwani - Randomized algorithm
• Stephen Muggleton

N

• Mihai Nadin – anticipation research
• Makoto Nagao – machine translation, natural language processing, digital library
• Frieder Nake – pioneered computer arts
• Peter Naur – BNF, ALGOL 60
• Roger Needham
• James G. Nell – GERAM
• Bernard de Neumann – massively parallel autonomous cellular processor, software engineering research
• John von Neumann (1903–1957) – early computers, von Neumann machine, set theory, functional analysis, mathematics pioneer, linear programming, quantum mechanics.
• Allen Newell – artificial intelligence, Computer Structures
• Max Newman – Colossus, MADM
• Andrew Ng – artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics
• Nils Nilsson – artificial intelligence
• G.M. Nijssen – NIAM
• Jerre Noe
• Emmy Noether
• Peter Nordin – artificial intelligence, genetic programming, evolutionary robotics
• Donald Norman – user interfaces, usability
• George Novacky – Assistant Department Chair and Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, Assistant Dean of CAS for Undergraduate Studies at University of Pittsburgh
• Kristen Nygaard – Simula

O

• T. William Olle – Ferranti Mercury
• Steve Omohundro
• Mark Overmars – game programming

P

• Christos Papadimitriou
• David Parnas – information hiding, modular programming
• Yale Patt – Instruction-level parallelism, speculative architectures
• David A. Patterson
• Randy Pausch (1960–2008) – Human-Computer interaction, Carnegie professor, "Last Lecture"
• Juan Pavón - software agents
• Judea Pearl – artificial intelligence, Search
• David John Pearson - CADES, computer graphics
• Alan Perlis – Programming Pearls
• Radia Perlman – spanning tree protocol
• Simon Peyton Jones – functional programming
• Gordon Plotkin
• Amir Pnueli – temporal logic
• Willem van der Poel – computer graphics, robotics, geographic information systems, imaging, multimedia, virtual environments, games
• Emil Post – mathematics
• Jon Postel – Internet
• Franco Preparata
• William H. Press – numerical algorithms

R

• Michael O. Rabin – nondeterministic machines
• Dragomir R. Radev – Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval
• T. V. Raman – accessibility, Emacspeak, etc.
• Brian Randell – dependability
• Raj Reddy – AI
• David P. Reed
• Trygve Reenskaug - Model-view-controller (MVC) software architecture pattern
• John C. Reynolds
• Joyce K. Reynolds – Internet
• Adam Riese
• C. J. van Rijsbergen
• Dennis Ritchie – C (programming language), UNIX
• Ron Rivest – RSA, MD5, RC4
• Colette Rolland – REMORA methodology, meta modelling
• Azriel Rosenfeld
• Douglas T. Ross – Structured Analysis and Design Technique
• Guido van Rossum – Python (programming language)
• Winston W. Royce – Waterfall model
• Rudy Rucker – mathematician, writer, educator
• Steven Rudich – complexity theory, cryptography
• Jeff Rulifson
• James Rumbaugh – Unified Modeling Language, Object Management Group
• Peter Ružička - Slovak computer scientist and mathematician

S

• George Sadowsky
• Gerard Salton – information retrieval
• Jean E. Sammet – programming languages
• Claude Sammut – artificial-intelligence researcher
• Carl Sassenrath – operating systems, programming languages, Amiga, REBOL
• Mahadev Satyanarayanan – file systems, distributed systems, mobile computing, pervasive computing
• Walter Savitch – discovery of complexity class NL, Savitch's theorem, natural language processing, mathematical linguistics
• Jonathan Schaeffer
• Wilhelm Schickard – one of first calculating machines
• Bruce Schneier – cryptography, security
• Fred B. Schneider – concurrent and distributed computing
• Dana Scott – domain theory
• Michael L. Scott – programming languages, algorithms, distributed computing
• Ravi Sethi – compilers, 2nd Dragon Book
• Nigel Shadbolt
• Adi Shamir – RSA, cryptanalysis
• Claude Shannon – information theory
• David E. Shaw – computational finance, computational biochemistry, parallel architectures
• Cliff Shaw – systems programmer, artificial intelligence
• Scott Shenker – networking
• Ben Shneiderman – human-computer interaction, information visualization
• Edward H. Shortliffe – MYCIN (Medical diagnostoc expert system)
• Joseph Sifakis – model checking
• Herbert A. Simon – artificial intelligence
• Munindar P. Singh – multiagent systems, software engineering, artificial intelligence, social networks
• Daniel Sleator – splay tree, amortized analysis
• Arne Sølvberg – information modelling
• Brian Cantwell Smith – reflection (computer science), 3lisp
• Steven Spewak – Enterprise architecture planning
• Robert Sproull
• Maciej Stachowiak – GNOME, Safari, WebKit
• Richard Stallman (born 1953) – GNU Project
• Ronald Stamper
• Richard Stearns – computational complexity theory
• Guy L. Steele, Jr. – Scheme, Common Lisp
• Thomas Sterling – creator of Beowulf clusters
• W. Richard Stevens (1951–1999) – author of books, including TCP/IP Illustrated and Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment
• Larry Stockmeyer – computational complexity, distributed computing
• Michael Stonebraker – relational database practice and theory
• Olaf Storaasli – finite element machine, linear algebra, high performance computing
• Christopher Strachey – denotational semantics
• Bjarne Stroustrup – C++
• Madhu Sudan – computational complexity theory, coding theory
• Gerald Jay Sussman – Scheme
• Bert Sutherland – graphics, Internet
• Ivan Sutherland – graphics
• Mario Szegedy – complexity theory, quantum computing

T

• Andrew S. Tanenbaum – operating systems, MINIX
• Bernhard Thalheim – Conceptual modelling foundation
• Éva Tardos
• Gábor Tardos
• Robert Tarjan – splay tree
• Jaime Teevan
• Shang-Hua Teng – analysis of algorithms
• Larry Tesler – human-computer interaction, graphical user interface, Apple Macintosh
• Avie Tevanian – Mach kernel team, NeXT, Mac OS X
• Ken Thompson – Unix
• Sebastian Thrun – AI researcher and inventor of autonomous driving
• Walter F. Tichy – RCS
• Seinosuke Toda – computation complexity, recipient of 1998 Gödel Prize
• Linus Torvalds (1969-∞) – Linux kernel, Git
• Godfried Toussaint – computational geometry – computational music therory
• Joseph F Traub – computational complexity of scientific problems
• John Tukey – FFT
• Murray Turoff – computer-mediated communication
• Alan Turing (1912–1954) – British computing pioneer, Turing Machine, algorithms, cryptology, computer architecture.

U

• Jeffrey D. Ullman – compilers, databases, complexity theory

V

• Leslie Valiant – computational complexity theory, computational learning theory
• Vladimir Vapnik
• Srinidhi Varadarajan – System X: VirginiaTech's Power Mac G5 Supercluster
• Umesh Vazirani
• Vijay Vazirani
• François Vernadat – enterprise modeling
• Richard Veryard – enterprise modeling

W

• Philip Wadler – functional programming
• David Wagner – security, cryptography
• Larry Wall (born 1954) – inventor of Perl programming language, study of language structure
• David Waltz
• James Z. Wang
• Manfred K. Warmuth – computational learning theory
• David H. D. Warren – AI, logic programming, Prolog, the 'W' in WAM
• Kevin Warwick – artificial intelligence
• Jan Weglarz
• Jie Wu – computer networks
• Peter Wegner – object-oriented programming, interaction (computer science)
• Peter J. Weinberger – programming language design, the 'w' in AWK
• Mark Weiser – ubiquitous computing
• Joseph Weizenbaum – artificial intelligence, ELIZA
• Franklin H. Westervelt – use of computers in engineering education, conversational use of computers, MTS, ARPANET, distance learning
• Steve Whittaker – Human Computer Interaction, Computer Support for Cooperative Work, Social Media
• Jennifer Widom – nontraditional data management
• Gio Wiederhold – database management systems
• Adriaan van Wijngaarden – Dutch pioneer; ARRA, ALGOL
• Mary Allen Wilkes – LINC developer, assembler-linker designer
• Maurice Vincent Wilkes – microprogramming, EDSAC
• Yorick Wilks – computational linguistics, artificial intelligence
• James H. Wilkinson – numerical analysis
• Sophie Wilson – ARM architecture
• Shmuel Winograd – Coppersmith–Winograd algorithm
• Terry Winograd – artificial intelligence, SHRDLU
• Niklaus Wirth – Pascal, Modula, Oberon (programming language)
• Dennis E. Wisnosky – Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing (ICAM), IDEF
• Stephen Wolfram – Mathematica
• William Wulf – compilers

Y

• Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
• John Yen
• Edward Yourdon – Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method

Z

• Lotfi Zadeh – fuzzy logic
• Arif Zaman – Pseudo-random number generator
• Konrad Zuse – German pioneer of hardware and software

See also

• Academic genealogy of computer scientists
• List of computing people
• List of important publications in computer science
• List of members of the National Academy of Sciences (computer and information sciences)
• List of pioneers in computer science
• List of programmers
• List of programming language researchers
• List of Russian IT developers

External links

• CiteSeer list of the most cited authors in computer science
• Computer scientists with h-index >= 40