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Awesome Programmers

A list of history's greatest software engineers and tech pioneers

2.6k stars136 forks292 entriesLast push May 11, 2021 (5 years ago)License none

This page lists names, links and short descriptions. The original list on GitHub is the source and belongs to its authors.

General

awesomeprogrammers.com

Databases

Edgar F. Codd

The inventor of the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for RDMS and co-creator of System R, the first implementation of the SQL database query language.

Charles W. Bachman

The designer of the linked-list data storage database Integrated Data Store, known to be one of the first database management systems and he is the organizer of the group CODASYL.

Donald D. Chamberlin

The co-creator of the most popular database query language, SQL.

Raymond F. Boyce

The co-creator of the most popular database query language, SQL.

Jeff Dean

The co-author of the seminal paper of "big data" storage BigTable, the co-developer of the BigTable system, the co-author of the important paper for the "big data" operational model MapReduce and the co-author of the paper for a highly distributed database Spanner.

Sanjay Ghemawat

The co-author of the seminal paper of "big data" storage BigTable, the co-developer of the BigTable system, the co-author of the important paper for the "big data" operational model MapReduce, the co-author of the large cluster data system Google File System and the co-author of the paper for a…

Michael Stonebraker

The creator of one of the first implementations of the relational database model Ingres and the creator of the very popular relational database Postgres database.

Doug Cutting

The co-creator of the BigTable inspired, de-facto "big data" distributed file system and processing framework Hadoop.

Mike Cafarella

The co-creator of the BigTable inspired, de-facto "big data" distributed file system and processing framework Hadoop.

Avinash Lakshman

The co-creator of the Dynamo storage system which has played an influential role in the modern design of highly scalable databases. He is also the creator of the Cassandra distributed database system.

Werner Vogels

The co-creator of the Dynamo storage system which has played an influential role in the modern design of highly scalable databases.

Jim Gray

The original designer of database transactions, the single logical unit of work performed by a database.

Andreas Reuter

Helped coin the definitions for ACID properties of database transactions.

Theo Härder

Helped coin the definitions for ACID properties of database transactions.

Phil Bernstein

The creator of concepts for concurrency control over distributed networks

Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez)

The creator of the Redis key-value database

In 2 lists

Prashant Malik

The co-creator of the Cassandra distributed database system

Peter Chen

The creator of the Entity–relationship model which was a more familiar database design than earlier versions of relational models.

T. William Olle

He was an active developer in the CODASYL consortium that promoted effective data systems analysis, design and implementation.

C.Wayne Ratliff

The creator of dBase, originally named Vulcan, one of the first databases with a development environment on personal computers in the 1980s.

Malcolm Atkinson

One of the early pioneers of the Object database defining the core concepts in his paper Object-Oriented Database Manifesto.

Dwight Merriman

The creator of the popular document-oriented database system Mongodb.

Shay Banon

The creator of the Lucene based full-text search engine database Elasticsearch.

Yonik Seeley

The creator of the Lucene based full-text search engine database Solr.

Joydeep Sen Sarma

The co-creator of the Hadoop based data warehouse framework Hive.

Ashish Thusoo

The co-creator of the Hadoop based data warehouse framework Hive.

Brad Fitzpatrick

The creator of the distributed memory caching system Memcached.

Andy Gross

The co-creator of the highly scalable key-value database Riak.

Damien Katz

The creator of the document-oriented database CouchDB.

Luca Garulli

The co-creator of the multi-model NoSQL database OrientDB

Andrey Lomakin

The co-creator of the multi-model NoSQL database OrientDB

Emil Eifrem

The co-creator of the graph database Neo4j

Johan Svensson

The co-creator of the graph database Neo4j

Matthias Broecheler

The creator of the graph database Titan

Algorithms / Datatypes

Donald E. Knuth

Help contribute to the development of algorithm analysis and help formalize algorithm techniques like asymptotic notation and knuth-bendix completion algorithm.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Helped develop many profoundly impactful algorithms such as Dijkstra's algorithm (shortest path algorithm), Prim's algorithm and Shunting-yard algorithm

John Von Neumann

The inventor of the Merge Sort algorithm, an efficient and one of the most widely used sorting algorithms.

Ray Solomonoff

The creator of algorithmic probability which introduced a method to assign prior probability to a given observation, the founder of the theory of unviersal inductive inference, and founder of algorithmic information theory.

Leslie Lamport

The creator of the impactful Bakery algorithm which orders processes based on their arrival like a bakery providing "loop freedom" and improving safety for shared resources on multiple threads, the creator of the Paxos algorithm / protocol now considered to be the de-facto framework for designing…

Robert W. Floyd

The creator of important algorithms like Floyd–Warshall algorithm for finding the shortest path in a graph, the Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm, and the Floyd–Steinberg dithering algorithm commonly used for image manipulation.

Tony Hoare

The creator the sorting algorithm quicksort, one of the most commonly used algorithms.

Michael Burrows

The co-creator of the efficient string compression algorithm Burrows–Wheeler transform.

David Wheeler

The co-creator of the efficient string compression algorithm Burrows–Wheeler transform.

Cliff Shaw

The creator of one of the most common data structures, the linked list.

Stephen Cook

The author of seminal papers that describe the notions of polynomial-time reduction, NP-completeness and propositional proof system, all making significant contributions to algorithmic complexity.

Richard M. Karp

The co-creator of the Edmonds-Karp algorithm for efficiently computing a networks maximum flow, the author of proof for 21 NP-complete problems, the co-publisher of the Hopcroft–Karp algorithm for finding maximum cardinality matchings, the co-creator of the Rabin–Karp algorithm for string…

John Hopcroft

The co-publisher of the Hopcroft–Karp algorithm for finding maximum cardinality matchings and the co-publisher of the Hopcroft-Tarjan Planarity Algorithm.

Robert Tarjan

The publisher of the Tarjan's off-line lowest common ancestors algorithm, the publisher of Tarjan's strongly connected components algorithm, the co-author of the Hopcroft-Tarjan Planarity Algorithm, the creator of the Fibonacci heap data structure and co-created the splay tree data structure.

John Cocke

The co-creator of the CYK algorithm for parsing context-free grammars in compilers.

Juris Hartmanis

The co-author of an influential paper that establishes the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory and introduced time complexity classes quantifying the efficiency of an algorithm.

Arthur Samuel

The first known user of the hash table data structure in a program.

Richard E. Stearns

The co-author of an influential paper that establishes the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory and introduced time complexity classes quantifying the efficiency of an algorithm.

Geoffrey Hinton

One of the first to demonstrate the use of Backpropagation algorithm to train multi-layer neural networks influencing the deep learning community.

Chi-Chih Andrew Yao

The author of complexity theory proof Yao's principle which "has become a fundamental technique for reasoning about randomized algorithms and complexity", the co-author of Dolev–Yao model, the author of important rules for Pseudorandom number generators, the author of the paper "On the security of…

Leslie G. Valiant

The author of an important paper introducing Probably approximately correct learning model for machine learning, and the discoverer of Sharp-P-complete definition in complexity theory.

Michael O. Rabin

The creator of the first randomized algorithm with the Closest pair problem, the co-creator of the Miller–Rabin primality test, and the co-creator of the Rabin–Karp algorithm for string searching.

Charles E. Leiserson

The creator of the fat-tree interconnection network for provably efficient communication, and the creator of the Cache-oblivious algorithm.

Jon Bentley

The creator of the k-d tree space-partitioning data structure widely used for searching with multidimensional keys, and the creator of the Bentley–Ottmann algorithm.

Algorithms / Datatypes >Cryptography

Manuel Blum

The developer of an important complexity theory that spawned results like the compression theorem, the Gap theorem and Blum's speedup theorem. The creator of the median of medians algorithm which finds the median in linear time. The co-creator of cryptography applications like the Blum Blum Shub…

Ron Rivest

The co-creator of one of the first and most widely used practical public-key cryptosystems RSA, the creator of the symmetric key encryption algorithms (RC2, RC4, RC5), and the creator of hash functions MD2, MD4, MD5 and MD6.

Adi Shamir

The co-creator of one of the first and most widely used practical public-key cryptosystems RSA, the co-creator of Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme a type of zero-knowledge proof, the creator of Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm, the co-creator of most well-known visual cryptography…

Leonard Adleman

The co-creator of one of the first and most widely used practical public-key cryptosystems RSA, and the author of the influential paper "Molecular Computation of Solutions To Combinatorial Problems" which introduced the concept of using DNA as a computational system.

Whitfield Diffie

The co-author of important cryptography paper "New Directions in Cryptography" introducing the Diffie–Hellman key exchange, one-way encoding functions using a public-key, which later inspired the practical implementation of RSA.

Claude Shannon

One of the main codebreaking teams during World War II, and author of a seminal paper explaining unbreakable ciphers.

Martin Hellman

The co-author of important cryptography paper "New Directions in Cryptography" introducing the Diffie–Hellman key exchange, one-way encoding functions using a public-key, which later inspired the practical implementation of RSA.

Shafi Goldwasser

The co-creator of encryption algorithm Blum–Goldwasser cryptosystem which unlike RSA has been mathematically proven to be as hard to break as factoring, the co-creator of encryption algorithm Goldwasser–Micali cryptosystem considered to be the first probabilistic public-key encryption scheme, the…

Silvio Micali

The co-creator of encryption algorithm Goldwasser–Micali cryptosystem considered to be the first probabilistic public-key encryption scheme, the co-author of Zero-knowledge proof in the paper "The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof-Systems", and the co-definer of for proper constructions of…

Michael O. Rabin

The creator of the first randomized algorithm with the Closest pair problem, the co-creator of the Miller–Rabin primality test, and the co-creator of the Rabin–Karp algorithm for string searching.

Artificial Intelligence

Alan Turing

The father of artificial intelligence, the creator of the Turing Test standard for which a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior is measured, and pioneered concepts of machines computing according to a set of rules.

Marvin Minsky

Helped establish the principle concepts of artificial intelligence and co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory

John McCarthy

One of the founders for the discipline of artificial intelligence and coined the term "artificial intelligence".

Allen Newell

The co-creator of two of the earliest Artificial Intelligence programs, the Logic Theorist developed to imitate the problem solving skills of humans and the General Problem Solver .

Herbert A. Simon

The co-creator of two of the earliest Artificial Intelligence programs, the Logic Theorist developed to imitate the problem solving skills of humans and the General Problem Solver .

Cliff Shaw

The creator of one of the most common data structures, the linked list.

Christopher Strachey

The creator of the first functional artificial intelligence program for playing checkers.

Nathaniel Rochester

He is sometimes considered to be the founder in the academic field of artificial intelligence by organizing a group in IBM focused on the subject. This group later evolved into the Dartmouth Conferences, the seminal event in the artificial intelligence.

Herbert Gelernter

The co-author of the paper "Intelligent Behavior in Problem-Solving Machines" to describe a theorem prover in geometry to exhibit intelligent behavior in machines.

Oliver Selfridge

The "Father of Machine Perception" and author of important paper "Pandemonium" introducing the first pattern recognition model Pandemonium architecture and the aspect oriented programming paradigm.

Arthur Samuel

The first known user of the hash table data structure in a program.

Margaret Masterman

The co-creator of semantic nets for machine translation pioneering the field of computational linguistics.

Ray Solomonoff

The creator of algorithmic probability which introduced a method to assign prior probability to a given observation, the founder of the theory of unviersal inductive inference, and founder of algorithmic information theory.

Edward Feigenbaum

The chief developer of the first expert system Dendral primarily used to explore induction in problems for the scientific commmunity, and author of the first articles of artificial intelligence "Computers and Thought".

Leonard Uhr

The co-author of significantly valuable paper "A Pattern Recognition Program That Generates, Evaluates, and Adjusts Its Own Operators" describing one of the first machine learning programs.

Raj Reddy

The co-creator of early robotic systems like the Hearsay 1 that demonstrated advanced language speaking, and co-creator of many innovative artificial intelligence systems like the "blackboard model".

Seymour Papert

The researcher and author with Marvin Minsky of Perceptrons used in artificial neural networks, and the co-director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Wally Feurzeig

The creator of the first intelligent computer-assisted instruction system "MENTOR" using a set of rules for problem-solving.

Richard Greenblatt

The creator of the MacHack computer chess-playing program which became the first to win against a human opponent in tournament play.

Frank Rosenblatt

The creator of the Mark 1 Perceptron neural network device generally recognized as a forerunner to artificial intelligence.

Joel Moses

The co-creator of the Macsyma computer algebra system that demonstrated the use of symbolic reasoning for integration problems and became the first successful knowledge-based mathematical program.

Roger Schank

The founder of Conceptual dependency theory, a natural language understanding model used in artificial intelligence systems, and founder of computer reasoning process CBR (Case-based reasoning).

Yorick Wilks

The early pioneer of the algorithmic method "Preference Semantics" used to computationaly interpret sentences in machine translation systems and in the field of word sense disambiguation.

Jaime Carbonell

The creator of the "Scholar" semantic net based program for computer assisted instruction, the creator of "MMR (maximal marginal relevance)" technology for summarizing text in search engines, and founder of the LTI (Language Technologies Institute) Carnegie Mellon University division focused on…

Feng-hsiung Hsu

The creator of the IBM Deep Blue chess machine showing ability to defeat Grandmaster chess players in tournament play.

Andrew Ng

The co-founder of Google Brain research project where one of the first applications of the deep learning model was applied and the co-developer of Robot Operating System.

Jeff Dean

The co-author of the seminal paper of "big data" storage BigTable, the co-developer of the BigTable system, the co-author of the important paper for the "big data" operational model MapReduce and the co-author of the paper for a highly distributed database Spanner.

Judea Pearl

The creator of the highly important Bayesian networks probabilistic graphical model and the principal inference algorithms within the model. He is also the developer of a theory for casual inference.

Jacek Karpiński

The co-creator of one of the first machine learning algorithms for character and image recognition.

Gerald Jay Sussman

The creator of artificial intelligence based CAD technology, the contributor to AI research like Debugging Almost-Right Plans and dependency-based backtracking.

Tools

Tim Berners-Lee

The creator of the first web browser, and the first web server CERN httpd

Richard Matthew Stallman

The creator of the GNU open source operating system, co-creator of the original Emacs text-editor also known as "GNUMACS", and the creator of the popular debugging tool GDB (GNU)

Marc Andreessen

The co-creator of the first widely used modern web browser Mosaic popularizing the world wide web.

Robert McCool

The creator of Apache HTTP Server

Butler Lampson

The co-creator of the operating system, laser printer software, the first Ethernet and the Bravo WYSIWYG text editor for the first personal computer Xerox Alto.

Charles Thacker

The original designer, co-creator of the laser printer software and the first Ethernet for the first personal computer Xerox Alto.

Doug Cutting

The co-creator of the BigTable inspired, de-facto "big data" distributed file system and processing framework Hadoop.

Mike Cafarella

The co-creator of the BigTable inspired, de-facto "big data" distributed file system and processing framework Hadoop.

Jeff Dean

The co-author of the seminal paper of "big data" storage BigTable, the co-developer of the BigTable system, the co-author of the important paper for the "big data" operational model MapReduce and the co-author of the paper for a highly distributed database Spanner.

Bill Joy

The creator of the Unix text editor vi, the creator of the C shell command-line interpreter, one of the earliest developers of BSD and co-creator of NFS Version 2.

Lars Bak

The creator of JavaScript engine V8.

Matei Zaharia

The creator of the cluster computing framework Spark and the cluster management system Mesos.

Jason van Zyl

The creator of Maven build automation tool for JVM environments

James Duncan Davidson

The creator of the Tomcat Java HTTP web server

Alexander Stepanov

The primary designer and implementer of the C++ Standard Template Library and helped formalize concepts of generic programming.

Stephen R. Bourne

The creator of the influential command-line interpreter Bourne Shell.

Nathan Marz

The creator of the distributed stream processing framework Storm.

In 2 lists

Ryan Dahl

The creator of the Node.js JavaScript runtime interpreter

Solomon Hykes

The creator of Docker, the system virtualization tool

Erich Gamma

The co-creator of popular code testing framework for Java JUnit.

Kent Beck

The co-creator of SUnit unit testing framework for Smalltalk, and co-creator of popular code testing framework for Java JUnit.

Ward Cunningham

The creator of the wiki, the first web content-collaboration tool.

Igor Sysoev

The creator of popular web server Nginx.

Jamie Zawinski

One of the original developers of the Mozilla browser and open-source community, and one of the early developers of the Netscape Navigator browser.

Daniel J. Bernstein

The creator of a mail transfer agent qmail with an emphasis on security, and the creator of the highly secure DNS server djbdns.

Michael Burrows

The co-creator of the efficient string compression algorithm Burrows–Wheeler transform.

Robby Russell

The creator of popular shell framework oh-my-zsh.

Cheng Zhao

The creator of the popular desktop application development environment electron.

Michael DeHaan

The creator of the computer automation, configuration management tool Ansible.

In 2 lists

David Cournapeau

The creator of the machine learning library for python Scikit-learn.

Max Howell

The creator of the package management system for macOS homebrew.

In 2 lists

Mitchell Hashimoto

The creator of the virtual environment build tool Vagrant.

Jose Valim

The co-creator of the authentication plugin for Rails Devise.

Yangqing Jia

The creator of the deep learning framework Caffe.

Jon Skeet

The co-creator of the popular data serializing tool Protocol Buffers.

Brendan Burns

The co-creator of container cluster management system Kubernetes, inspired by the Google Borg project.

Joe Beda

The co-creator of container cluster management system Kubernetes, inspired by the Google Borg project.

Jonas Bonér

The creator of concurrent and distributed application toolkit on the JVM Akka.

Jay Kreps

The creator of the high-throughput message broker Kafka.

Jun Rao

The creator of the high-throughput message broker Kafka.

Neha Narkhede

The creator of the high-throughput message broker Kafka.

Ben Reed

The distributed key-value store primarily used as Hadoop's configuration and synchronization service Zookeeper.

Lars Rasmussen

The co-creator of the original system for Google Maps.

Jack Dongarra

The co-creator of linear algebra tool BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms), the co-creator of the parallel computing message system MPI (message passing interface), the creator of ranking system for powerful computers TOP500 and co-creator of linear algebra library ATLAS.

Travis Oliphant

The creator of NumPy, a package for numerical computing in Python.

Wes McKinney

The creator of the Pandas data manipulation library.

Bram Moolenaar

The creator of the Vim text editor.

Tools >Operating Systems

Dennis Ritchie

The co-creator of the Unix operating system family that inspired the architecture of many modern operating systems like Linux.

Ken Thompson

The co-creator of the Unix operating system family and one of the original developers for the Plan 9 operating system.

Rob Pike

The co-creator of Plan 9 operating system and the Inferno operating system.

Linus Torvalds

The creator of the Linux Operating System Kernel and the Git distributed version control system.

Brian Kernighan

One of the original developers of the Unix operating system family, often credited to coin the name.

Dave Cutler

The co-creator of Windows NT operating system family which it's kernel is still the foundation of the modern Microsoft operating system.

Ian Murdock

The creator of one of the most popular Linux operating system distribution Debian.

Douglas McIlroy

The creator of Unix / Linux feature Pipeline that chains a sequence of process together with a pipe character, the creator of Unix based data comparison tool diff utility, and the creator of the Unix based listing command sort.

Russ Cox

The core developer of the Plan 9 operating system, and the core developer of the Go programming language.

Theo de Raadt

The creator of OpenBSD, focused on portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography.

Robert Creasy

The project developer for the first full virtualization hypervisor, the IBM CP-40

Tools >Development Frameworks

Rod Johnson

The creator of the popular web application development framework for Java Spring.

David Heinemeier Hansson

The creator of Ruby on Rails, the web application framework

Jordan Walke

The original author of React JavaScript framework.

In 2 lists

Adrian Holovaty

The co-creator of the Django web framework.

Simon Willison

The co-creator of the Django web framework.

Mark Otto

The co-creator of the front-end web framework Twitter Bootstrap.

Jacob Thornton

The co-creator of the front-end web framework Twitter Bootstrap.

In 2 lists

Mike Bostock

The creator of the D3 JavaScript library

John Resig

The creator of the jQuery JavaScript Library

Miško Hevery

The creator of the JavaScript web application framework AngularJS.

Erik Meijer

The creator of the asynchronous programming framework Reactive extensions.

Ben Christensen

The creator of the asynchronous programming framework RxJava.

Armin Ronacher

The creator of the micro web application framework for python Flask.

In 2 lists

Geoff Schmidt

The co-creator of popular JavaScript application development environment meteor.

Guillermo Rauch

The creator of the real-time JavaScript application framework Socket.io.

Guillaume Bort

The creator of the web application framework for Scala and Java Play.

Taylor Otwell

The creator of the PHP web application framework Laravel.

Yehuda Katz

The co-creator of the JavaScript application development framework Ember.js, the creator of JavaScript templating tool handlebars, the co-creator of package management system for ruby bundler, and once a member of core development teams for "jQuery" and "Ruby on Rails".

Fabien Potencier

The creator of the PHP web application framework Symfony.

Programming Languages

Dennis Ritchie

The co-creator of the Unix operating system family that inspired the architecture of many modern operating systems like Linux.

Ken Thompson

The co-creator of the Unix operating system family and one of the original developers for the Plan 9 operating system.

Alan J. Perlis

The co-creator ALGOL programming language andhelped standardize education of computer science and programming language design.

John McCarthy

One of the founders for the discipline of artificial intelligence and coined the term "artificial intelligence".

Donald E. Knuth

Help contribute to the development of algorithm analysis and help formalize algorithm techniques like asymptotic notation and knuth-bendix completion algorithm.

Brian Kernighan

One of the original developers of the Unix operating system family, often credited to coin the name.

Chris Lattner

The creator of the LLVM compiler infrastructure, the Clang front-end compiler and the Swift programming language.

Kristen Nygaard

The co-inventor of Simula which introduced the formal concept of object-oriented programming paradigm.

Ole-Johan Dahl

The co-inventor of Simula which introduced the formal concept of object-oriented programming paradigm.

Alain Colmerauer

The creator of Prolog and one of the main founders of Constraint logic programming

James Gosling

The creator of the Oak programming language which later became Java

Niklaus Wirth

The creator of several important programming languages including Euler, Algol W, and the Pascal procedural programming language.

Konrad Zuse

The creator of the first high-level programming language Plankalkül originally created for his original and world's first programmable computer, the Z3.

Bjarne Stroustrup

The creator of C++, one of the most popular programming languages of all time.

Larry Wall

The creator of the Perl dynamic programming language popularized by its unsurpassed regular expression and string parsing abilities.

Don Syme

The creator of the F# programming language, and the creator of generics in .NET framework.

Anders Hejlsberg

One of the original authors of C#, Delphi Pascal dialet programming toolkit and the Typescript JavaScript superset language.

Joe Armstrong

The creator of the Erlang functional programming language known for being well suited for systems that are distributed, fault tolerant, and concurrent.

Rob Pike

The co-creator of Plan 9 operating system and the Inferno operating system.

Alan Cooper

The creator of Visual Basic, a user-friendly programming language for Microsoft applications.

John G. Kemeny

The co-creator of the Basic Programming Language.

Thomas E. Kurtz

The co-creator of the Basic Programming Language.

Brad Cox

The co-creator of Objective-C Programming Language

Brendan Eich

The creator of JavaScript Programming Language

Guido van Rossum

The creator of the Python programming language.

Erik Meijer

The creator of the asynchronous programming framework Reactive extensions.

Grady Booch

The co-creator of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) popularly used to provide a standard visual notation for system designs.

Ivar Jacobson

The co-creator of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) popularly used to provide a standard visual notation for system designs, and the co-creator of SDL (Specifications and Design Language).

James Rumbaugh

The co-creator of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) popularly used to provide a standard visual notation for system designs.

Kevin Hammond

The co-creator of the specifications for Haskell programming language, and the co-creator of GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler).

Simon Peyton Jones

The co-creator of the specifications for Haskell programming language, and the co-creator of GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler).

Rich Hickey

The creator of the Clojure functional programming language, a modern Lisp that compiles for the Java virtual machine.

Seymour Papert

The researcher and author with Marvin Minsky of Perceptrons used in artificial neural networks, and the co-director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Cynthia Solomon

The co-creator of the Logo educational programming language often used to draw line graphics with a turtle robot.

Wally Feurzeig

The creator of the first intelligent computer-assisted instruction system "MENTOR" using a set of rules for problem-solving.

Jean Ichbiah

The creator of Ada, an object oriented programming language.

Kenneth E. Iverson

The creator of APL that lead innovations in array programming and contributing to the development of the functional programming paradigm.

Yukihiro Matsumoto

The creator of the Ruby object-oriented programming language.

Bertrand Meyer

The creator of the Eiffel programming language, one of the first object oriented languages and creator of Design by contract.

Rasmus Lerdorf

The creator of the server-side scripting language PHP primarily used for web development.

Martin Odersky

The creator of the Scala functional / object-oriented programming language for the Java virtual machine.

Xavier Leroy

The co-creator of the OCaml programming language that has functional and object oriented properties to its design.

Graydon Hoare

The original creator of the Rust low-level systems programming language.

Jeremy Ashkenas

The creator of the JavaScript transcompiled programming language CoffeeScript.

Jose Valim

The co-creator of the authentication plugin for Rails Devise.

Lars Bak

The creator of JavaScript engine V8.

Jeff Bezanson

The co-creator of the Julia dynamic programming language designed for high performance scientific computing.

Stefan Karpinski

The co-creator of the Julia dynamic programming language designed for high performance scientific computing.

Viral B. Shah

The co-creator of the Julia dynamic programming language designed for high performance scientific computing.

Alan Edelman

The co-creator of the Julia dynamic programming language designed for high performance scientific computing.

Ary Borenszweig

The co-creator of the statically type, object oriented programming language Crystal inspired by Ruby's syntax and C's compilation.

Juan Wajnerman

The co-creator of the statically type, object oriented programming language Crystal inspired by Ruby's syntax and C's compilation.

Andrey Breslav

The co-creator of the JVM run, statically typed programming language Kotlin.

Slava Pestov

The creator of stack-oriented programming language Factor and a member of the core team for Swift.

Arthur Whitney

The creator of the programming language A+ and the creator of the programming language K.

John Ousterhout

The creator of the programming language Tcl.

Programming Languages >Theory

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Helped develop many profoundly impactful algorithms such as Dijkstra's algorithm (shortest path algorithm), Prim's algorithm and Shunting-yard algorithm

Alan Kay

He helped pioneer the idea of object-oriented programming and helped create the Smalltalk language originally used for graphical interfaces.

Maurice Wilkes

The designer of EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program. Also helped define concepts like microprogramming, symbolic labels and macros.

Tony Hoare

The creator the sorting algorithm quicksort, one of the most commonly used algorithms.

Allen Newell

The co-creator of two of the earliest Artificial Intelligence programs, the Logic Theorist developed to imitate the problem solving skills of humans and the General Problem Solver .

Herbert A. Simon

The co-creator of two of the earliest Artificial Intelligence programs, the Logic Theorist developed to imitate the problem solving skills of humans and the General Problem Solver .

Ivan Sutherland

The first to define the notion of "objects" and "instances" during the development of Sketchpad.

Peter Naur

The co-creator of the influential programming language Algol 60 introducing nested function with lexical scope, and the co-creator of the Backus-Naur form one of the main notation techniques for context free grammars used to describe syntax of programming languages.

Jean-Yves Girard

One of the discoverers of System F, the polymorphic lambda calculus that forms the theoretical basis for Haskell and ML.

John C. Reynolds

One of the discoverers of System F, the polymorphic lambda calculus that forms the theoretical basis for Haskell and ML.

Barbara Liskov

The co-creator of the important object-oriented subtyping definition Liskov substitution principle and the co-creator of CLU programming language that introduced key features like abstract data types, iterators and use of classes with constructors.

Robin Milner

The creator of ML functional programming language, the first language to use a polymorphic type inference alongside type-safe exception handling, and the creator of concurrency theory CCS (Calculus of communicating systems).

Christopher Strachey

The creator of the first functional artificial intelligence program for playing checkers.

Dana Scott

The co-creator of Denotational semantics or Scott–Strachey semantics formalizing the definitions of programming languages by creating mathematical denotations describing expressions from the language.

Noam Chomsky

The creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, a containment heirarchy for classes of formal grammars.

Seymour Ginsburg

The creator of the Abstract family of languages Theory, and proved languages like ALGOL are context-free.

Programming Languages >Compilers

Grace Hopper

The inventor of the A-0 System, often considered as the first compiler but functioned as a loader for Assembly resulting to the development of higher level programming languages like COBOL.

John Backus

The co-creator of the first high-level compiled programming language FORTRAN and its compiler, often credited as being the first optimizing compiler and fully complete compiler.

Frances E. Allen

The author of the paper "Program Optimization" that laid the basis for systematic analysis of computer programs, the author of "Control Flow Analysis" that uses intervals to analyze data flow, and the co-author of the paper "A Catalog of Optimizing Transformations" which is one of the main…

Richard Matthew Stallman

The creator of the GNU open source operating system, co-creator of the original Emacs text-editor also known as "GNUMACS", and the creator of the popular debugging tool GDB (GNU)

Nathaniel Rochester

He is sometimes considered to be the founder in the academic field of artificial intelligence by organizing a group in IBM focused on the subject. This group later evolved into the Dartmouth Conferences, the seminal event in the artificial intelligence.

Lois Haibt

The co-creator of the first high-level compiled programming language FORTRAN and its compiler.

Alon Zakai

The creator of emscripten, the LLVM to JavaScript compiler.

Computer Graphics

Alvy Ray Smith

He is the creator of HSB, the HSV color space, which is the most common model to represent RGB colors.

Ivan Sutherland

The first to define the notion of "objects" and "instances" during the development of Sketchpad.

Jim Blinn

The inventor of several now-ubiquitous rendering algorithms, including the Blinn-Phong shading model, bump mapping, and environment mapping.

Douglas Engelbart

The creator of the revolutionary NLS that employed the first practical use of hypertext and a precursor of the graphical user interface.

Alan Kay

He helped pioneer the idea of object-oriented programming and helped create the Smalltalk language originally used for graphical interfaces.

Larry Tesler

The co-creator of the Gypsy word processor with point and click ability, and the co-creator of "copy and paste" mechanism.

Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls Jr.

The co-creator of Bit blit data operations for computer graphics, and the popup menu graphical mechanism.

David Canfield Smith

The creator of the "Pygmalion" system that directly led to the concept of computer icons.

Bill Atkinson

The co-creator of the GUI for the Apple Lisa, the creator of the original drawing software MacPaint, and the creator of the QuickDraw graphics library.

Rob Pike

The co-creator of Plan 9 operating system and the Inferno operating system.

John Carmack

The video game creator of Doom and its 3D rendering engine Doom Engine who innovated in 3D graphics with the Carmack's reverse algorithm for shadow volumes.

William Fetter

The creator of the first human figure as a 3D model while exploring perspective fundamentals for computer graphics while the coining the term "computer graphics".

Pierre Bézier

The creator of 3D CAD, the creator of Bézier curve and Bézier surface 3D computer graphics concepts.

Michael Abrash

The co-creator of the video game and 3D rendering engine Quake Quake Engine.

Computer Architecture / Theory

Alan Turing

The father of artificial intelligence, the creator of the Turing Test standard for which a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior is measured, and pioneered concepts of machines computing according to a set of rules.

Kurt Gödel

The creator of Gödel's incompleteness theorems often considered to be the foundation of theoretical computer science and inspiration to Turing and Church, the creator of universal formal languages and the limits of proof and computation, and the creator of the proof for axiomatized arithmetic to…

Charles Babbage

The creator of the concept for a programmable general-purpose computer with the design of the Analytical Engine and the creator for a prototype for a less powerful mechanical calculator .

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Helped develop many profoundly impactful algorithms such as Dijkstra's algorithm (shortest path algorithm), Prim's algorithm and Shunting-yard algorithm

John Von Neumann

The inventor of the Merge Sort algorithm, an efficient and one of the most widely used sorting algorithms.

Leslie Lamport

The creator of the impactful Bakery algorithm which orders processes based on their arrival like a bakery providing "loop freedom" and improving safety for shared resources on multiple threads, the creator of the Paxos algorithm / protocol now considered to be the de-facto framework for designing…

Alonzo Church

The creator of mathematical logic system and computation model to simulate single-taped Turing machines called Lambda Calculus, and the co-creator of the Church–Turing thesis formalizing the definitions of computable functions.

Claude Shannon

One of the main codebreaking teams during World War II, and author of a seminal paper explaining unbreakable ciphers.

Ada Lovelace

The creator of mathematical operations for Charles Babbage's mechanical machines now recognized as being one of the first algorithms for a machine so is now considered to be one of the first computer programmers.

J. C. R. Licklider

The creator of concepts for modern-style interactive computing, and an early researcher at Arpanet for concepts of a connected network like the internet.

Stephen Cole Kleene

The creator of Regular expression pattern matching mechanism, and the creator of mathematical logic branch recursion theory

John McCarthy

One of the founders for the discipline of artificial intelligence and coined the term "artificial intelligence".

John Cocke

The co-creator of the CYK algorithm for parsing context-free grammars in compilers.

Fernando J. Corbató

The co-author of a paper that describes one of the earliest time-sharing computer systems CTSS (compatible time-sharing system) and the original creator of the influential time-sharing operating system Multics which pioneered many concepts widely adopted by almost all operating systems like Unix.

Per Brinch Hansen

The creator of the RC 4000 multiprogramming system introducing the concept of operating system kernels and microkernel architectures with the separation of policy and mechanism, the co-createor of the synchronization construct for threads with mutex and blocking ability known as the monitor, the…

Gerard Salton

The creator of vector space model for information retrievel.

Sophie Wilson

The co-creator of the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) architecture, the most widely used model for modern smartphones, and the creator of the BBC Basic language for the acorn systems.

Tommy Flowers

The creator of the Colossus computer, the first programmable digital computing systems.

Fred Brooks

The co-creator of the System 360 computer that introduced 8-bit byte addressing and first to emphasize the distinction of "system architecture" and implementation.

George Boole

The creator of Boolean Algebra mathematical logic which has inspired the basis of logic gates and computer science.

Michael O. Rabin

The creator of the first randomized algorithm with the Closest pair problem, the co-creator of the Miller–Rabin primality test, and the co-creator of the Rabin–Karp algorithm for string searching.

Dana Scott

The co-creator of Denotational semantics or Scott–Strachey semantics formalizing the definitions of programming languages by creating mathematical denotations describing expressions from the language.

Margaret Hamilton

The creator of important concepts in asynchronous systems, priority scheduling, and end-to-end testing.

Herman Hollerith

The creator of the punch-card Tabulating machine sparking the era of automatic data processing systems.

Joseph Marie Jacquard

The creator of Jacquard loom one of the first punch card controlled programmable mechanized loom.

Nikolay Brusentsov

The creator of a computer using ternary logic called the Seturn.

Vannevar Bush

The creator of what influenced hypertext, Memex, originally conceived to store compressed information.

Paul Baran

The co-creator of the packet switched computer network for an early prototype of internet technology at ARPANET.

Jean Bartik

The co-developer of early "stored program" computers and considered to be one of the first computer programmers, using the ENIAC, a vacuum tube computer during a time when "programming" meant using cables, dials, and switches to physically rewire the machine.

Richard Hamming

Defined numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes

Nathan Marz

The creator of the distributed stream processing framework Storm.

In 2 lists

Eric Brewer

The original writer of the CAP theorem stating that a distributed computer system cannot simultaneously provide the guarantees Consistency, Availability and Partition Tolerance.

John Atanasoff

He is known as the father of the computer. With the help of one of his students Clifford E. Berry, in Iowa State College, during the 1940s, he created the ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer) that was the first electronic digital computer.

Protocols / Standards

Tim Berners-Lee

The creator of the first web browser, and the first web server CERN httpd

Vint Cerf

The co-creator of the fundamental design principles for computer networking Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) in a profound paper "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication" essentially outlining the architecture of the internet.

Robert E. Kahn

The co-creator of the fundamental design principles for computer networking Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) in a profound paper "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication" essentially outlining the architecture of the internet.

Leslie Lamport

The creator of the impactful Bakery algorithm which orders processes based on their arrival like a bakery providing "loop freedom" and improving safety for shared resources on multiple threads, the creator of the Paxos algorithm / protocol now considered to be the de-facto framework for designing…

Jeremie Miller

The original creator of the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)

William Kahan

The primary architect behind the floating point computation standard IEEE 754-1985 which was the de-facto standard for implementation rules of floating points in software.

Butler Lampson

The co-creator of the operating system, laser printer software, the first Ethernet and the Bravo WYSIWYG text editor for the first personal computer Xerox Alto.

Rob Pike

The co-creator of Plan 9 operating system and the Inferno operating system.

Ken Thompson

The co-creator of the Unix operating system family and one of the original developers for the Plan 9 operating system.

Tim Bray

The co-author of the original XML specification

Bram Cohen

The author of the peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol, and the first BitTorrent program.

Development Processes

Kent Beck

The co-creator of SUnit unit testing framework for Smalltalk, and co-creator of popular code testing framework for Java JUnit.

Ward Cunningham

The creator of the wiki, the first web content-collaboration tool.

Dave Thomas

The co-founder of the "Agile Manifesto" and coined the phrases "DRY" Don't repeat yourself which emphasizes to reduce the repetition of code or data in software.

Ivar Jacobson

The co-creator of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) popularly used to provide a standard visual notation for system designs, and the co-creator of SDL (Specifications and Design Language).

Analysis / Verification

James H. Wilkinson

Helped facilitate the use of the high-speed digital computer with numerical analysis and the developer of the "backward" error analysis for algorithms.

Amir Pnueli

Introduced temporal logic into formal verification as a way to prove correctness in algorithms and a way to reason about time in computer programs.

Tony Hoare

The creator the sorting algorithm quicksort, one of the most commonly used algorithms.

Robert W. Floyd

The creator of important algorithms like Floyd–Warshall algorithm for finding the shortest path in a graph, the Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm, and the Floyd–Steinberg dithering algorithm commonly used for image manipulation.

Edmund Melson Clarke

The co-creator of the field for Model-checking that introduced a machine executed system of temporal logic to verify the computer program's correctness, and the co-creator of a system that represents state spaces during model checking runtime called symbolic model checking.

E. Allen Emerson

The co-creator of the field for Model-checking that introduced a machine executed system of temporal logic to verify the computer program's correctness.

Joseph Sifakis

The co-creator of the field for Model-checking that introduced a machine executed system of temporal logic to verify the computer program's correctness.

Books / Papers

Donald E. Knuth

Help contribute to the development of algorithm analysis and help formalize algorithm techniques like asymptotic notation and knuth-bendix completion algorithm.

Brian Kernighan

One of the original developers of the Unix operating system family, often credited to coin the name.

Dennis Ritchie

The co-creator of the Unix operating system family that inspired the architecture of many modern operating systems like Linux.

Alexander Stepanov

The primary designer and implementer of the C++ Standard Template Library and helped formalize concepts of generic programming.

Jeffrey Ullman

He helped write several popular textbooks ranging from compilers, computational theory, data structures and databases including the Dragon Book and the Cinderella Book.

Alfred Aho

He helped write several textbooks covering compilers and algorithms including industry classics like the Dragon Book, and the Principles of Compiler Design.

John Hopcroft

The co-publisher of the Hopcroft–Karp algorithm for finding maximum cardinality matchings and the co-publisher of the Hopcroft-Tarjan Planarity Algorithm.

Steve McConnell

The author of popular software development book Code Complete.

Fred Brooks

The co-creator of the System 360 computer that introduced 8-bit byte addressing and first to emphasize the distinction of "system architecture" and implementation.

Erich Gamma

The co-creator of popular code testing framework for Java JUnit.

Ralph Johnson

The "gang of four" co-author of influential book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

Richard Helm

The "gang of four" co-author of influential book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

John Vlissides

The "gang of four" co-author of influential book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

Hal Abelson

The co-author of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs also known as the "wizard book" that helped teach the principles of programming.

Gerald Jay Sussman

The creator of artificial intelligence based CAD technology, the contributor to AI research like Debugging Almost-Right Plans and dependency-based backtracking.

Thomas H. Cormen

The co-author of influential book Introduction to Algorithms also known as "CLRS" now considered to be the standard reference for algorithms.

Charles E. Leiserson

The creator of the fat-tree interconnection network for provably efficient communication, and the creator of the Cache-oblivious algorithm.

Clifford Stein

The co-author of influential book Introduction to Algorithms also known as "CLRS" now considered to be the standard reference for algorithms.

Andy Hunt

The co-author of software development book The Pragmatic Programmer, the co-author of many books in the "Pragmatic Bookshelf" series, and the co-author of "Programming Ruby".

Dave Thomas

The co-founder of the "Agile Manifesto" and coined the phrases "DRY" Don't repeat yourself which emphasizes to reduce the repetition of code or data in software.

Robert Cecil Martin

The author software development technique book "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship".

Scott Meyers

The author of book series "Effective C++".

Martin Fowler

The co-author along with Kent Beck of the book that popularized agile software development "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" and co-author of the "Manifesto for Agile Software Development".

Kent Beck

The co-creator of SUnit unit testing framework for Smalltalk, and co-creator of popular code testing framework for Java JUnit.

Glenford J. Myers

The author of several computer science textbooks including "The Art of Software Testing", "Software reliability" and "Composite/structured design".

Miscellaneous

Richard Matthew Stallman

The creator of the GNU open source operating system, co-creator of the original Emacs text-editor also known as "GNUMACS", and the creator of the popular debugging tool GDB (GNU)

Brian Kernighan

One of the original developers of the Unix operating system family, often credited to coin the name.

Jon Skeet

The user with the most "reputation" points on Stack Overflow.

Robert W. Floyd

The creator of important algorithms like Floyd–Warshall algorithm for finding the shortest path in a graph, the Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm, and the Floyd–Steinberg dithering algorithm commonly used for image manipulation.

Robert Tappan Morris

The creator of the internet's first computer worm Morris Worm.

Petr Mitrichev

The winner of multiple TopCoder competitions, took 100 wins in a single round of TopCoder, winner of Russian Code Cup, winner of Facebook Hacker Cup, winner of Yandex algorithm competition, and winner of Google Code Jam.

Gennady Korotkevich

The six time gold medalist for the International Olympiad in Informatics programming competition, on the winning team for several years in ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, multiple medal winner in the CodeForces contests, and winner of Google Code Jam for several consecutive years.

Hardware

Glenford J. Myers

The author of several computer science textbooks including "The Art of Software Testing", "Software reliability" and "Composite/structured design".

See category
94

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VoltAgent/awesome-openclaw-skills

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92

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Kristories/awesome-guidelines

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sindresorhus/awesome

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ai-boost/awesome-prompts

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matiassingers/awesome-readme

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