Computer science · Curated list
Alan Turing, Tim Berners-Lee, Richard Stallman and 37 more, ranked by how much of the world has written about each one.
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Most written-about first. Each description summarises the computer scientist's Wikipedia article, which its name links to.
1
English computer scientist (1912–1954)
Alan Mathison Turing, an English mathematician, logician, computer scientist, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He shaped the development of theoretical computer science deeply, formalising the ideas of computation and algorithm with the Turing machine, which can be regarded as a model of a general-purpose computer.
Wikidata · Photo: Elliott & Fry, Public domain
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2
English computer scientist (born 1955)
An English computer scientist, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, known as TimBL, who invented the World Wide Web together with HTTP, HTML and URLs. He holds a professorial research fellowship at Oxford, and is professor emeritus at MIT.
Wikidata · Photo: Web Summit, CC BY 2.0
3
American activist and programmer (born 1953)
Richard Matthew Stallman, also known by his initials, rms: an American programmer and activist of the free software movement. He campaigns for software to be distributed so that its users are free to use it, study it, modify it and pass it on.
4
English mathematician (1815–1852)
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, an English mathematician and writer best known for her work on the analytical engine, the mechanical general-purpose computer Charles Babbage proposed. She was the first to see that the machine could do more than pure calculation.
Wikidata · Photo: Antoine Claudet, Public domain
5
English mathematician, philosopher, and engineer (1791–1871)
An English polymath who worked as a mechanical engineer and inventor as well as a mathematician and philosopher. The idea of a digital programmable computer began with him.
Wikidata · Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
6
American engineer and programmer (born 1950)
Stephen Gary Wozniak, nicknamed Woz, an American inventor, computer programmer, electrical engineer and technology entrepreneur. In 1976 he co-founded Apple Inc. with his early business partner Steve Jobs.
Wikidata · Photo: Photo taken by Al Luckow, Copyrighted free use
7
American businessman (born 1973)
Lawrence Edward Page, an American computer scientist and businessman who founded Google with Sergey Brin. A centibillionaire, he is one of the richest people in the world.
Wikidata · Photo: Marcin Mycielski, European Parliament ( Stansfield ), CC BY-SA 4.0
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8
American computer scientist and mathematician (born 1938)
Donald Ervin Knuth, an American mathematician and computer scientist, professor emeritus at Stanford University.
Wikidata · Photo: Alex Handy, CC BY-SA 2.0
9
American computer scientist known for Unix (1941–2011)
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, an American computer scientist. With his long-time colleague Ken Thompson he created the B and C programming languages and the Unix operating system.
Wikidata · Photo: Denise Panyik-Dale, CC BY 2.0
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10
U.S. naval officer and computer scientist (1906–1992)
Grace Brewster Hopper, an American mathematician, computer scientist and rear admiral of the United States Navy, and a pioneer of computer programming.
Wikidata · Photo: James S. Davis, Public domain
11
Dutch computer scientist (1930–2002)
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, a Dutch mathematician, programmer, computer scientist and writer of essays on science.
Wikidata · Photo: Hamilton Richards, CC BY-SA 3.0
12
American computer programmer and activist (1986–2013)
Aaron Hillel Swartz, also known as AaronSw, an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organiser and Internet hacktivist. As a programmer he helped build the RSS web feed format, the technical architecture of Creative Commons, an organisation that creates copyright licences, and web.py, a website framework for Python.
13
British-Canadian computer scientist (born 1947)
Geoffrey Everest Hinton, a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive psychologist and cognitive scientist, and a Nobel laureate, whose work on artificial neural networks earned him the name "the Godfather of AI". He is a University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.
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14
German computer scientist and engineer (1910–1995)
Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse, a German civil engineer, inventor, businessman and pioneer of computer science. His greatest achievement was the first programmable computer in the world: the Z3, a working, program-controlled, Turing-complete machine, which began operating in May 1941.
Wikidata · Photo: Wolfgang Hunscher, Dortmund, CC BY-SA 3.0
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15
Danish computer scientist, creator of C++ (born 1950)
A computer scientist from Denmark, known for creating C++. He headed the Large-scale Programming Research department of Bell Labs, taught at Texas A&M University as professor of computer science, and worked at Morgan Stanley for over a decade while visiting professor at Columbia University.
16
American scientist (1927–2011)
An American cognitive scientist and computer scientist, one of those who founded artificial intelligence as a discipline, and one of a small group of AI researchers of the 1950s and 1960s.
17
American computer programmer (born 1949)
Howard G. Cunningham, an American computer programmer who built the first wiki and co-wrote the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Called a pioneer and an innovator, he also helped create extreme programming and software design patterns.
Wikidata · Photo: Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0
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18
American businessman (born 1962)
Gabe Logan Newell, nicknamed Gaben, an American businessman and video game developer who co-founded Valve, the video game company, and is its president.
Wikidata · Photo: Official GDC, CC BY 2.0
19
American computer scientist known for Unix (born 1943)
Kenneth Lane Thompson, an American computer science pioneer. For most of his career he worked at Bell Labs, where he designed and built the original Unix operating system.
Wikidata · Photo: A.C.Diller, CC BY-SA 4.0
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20
Swedish video game programmer (born 1979)
Markus Alexej Persson, known as Notch, a Swedish video game designer and programmer who created Minecraft, the best-selling video game ever.
Wikidata · Photo: Official GDC, CC BY 2.0
21
Swiss computer scientist (1934–2024)
Niklaus Emil Wirth, a Swiss computer scientist. He designed several programming languages, Pascal among them, and pioneered several classic subjects of software engineering.
22
Canadian computer scientist (born 1955)
James Arthur Gosling, a Canadian computer scientist best known for founding the Java programming language and leading its design.
Wikidata · Photo: Peter Campbell, CC BY-SA 4.0
23
American computer scientist and Internet pioneer (born 1943)
Vinton Gray Cerf, an American Internet pioneer, recognised as one of "the fathers of the Internet", a title he shares with Robert Kahn, who developed TCP/IP with him.
Wikidata · Photo: Duncan.Hull, CC BY-SA 4.0
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24
Dutch programmer and creator of Python (born 1956)
A Dutch programmer who created the Python programming language and was its "benevolent dictator for life" (BDFL) until he gave up the role on 12 July 2018.
Wikidata · Photo: Kushal Das, CC BY-SA 4.0
25
American computer scientist (1924–2007)
John Warner Backus, a computer scientist from the United States. He headed the team behind FORTRAN, which they invented and implemented, the first high-level programming language widely used; he also invented the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a notation widely used to define the syntax of formal languages.
Wikidata · Photo: PIerre.Lescanne, CC BY-SA 4.0
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26
American computer scientist, author and futurist (born 1948)
Raymond Kurzweil, an American inventor, futurist, entrepreneur, author and computer scientist, who works in fields such as electronic keyboard instruments, speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis and optical character recognition (OCR).
27
American computer scientist
Barbara Jane Liskov, an American computer scientist who has done pioneering work on distributed computing and programming languages. Her notable work includes introducing abstract data types, with the principle of data abstraction that goes with them, and the Liskov substitution principle, which carries these ideas over to inheritance, subtyping and object-oriented programming.
Wikidata · Photo: Dennis Hamilton from Seattle, Washington, USA, CC BY 2.0
28
American-Dutch computer scientist (born 1944)
Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum, sometimes known by the handle AST, a Dutch computer scientist born in America, now retired, who is professor emeritus of computer science at Amsterdam's Vrije Universiteit.
Wikidata · Photo: derivative work: Okoura ( talk ) AndrewTanenbaum.JPG : GerardM, CC BY 2.5
29
US programmer, author, and open-source advocate
Eric Steven Raymond, often called ESR, an American software developer and advocate of open-source software, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, an essay of 1997 and a book of 1999. He also wrote a guidebook to NetHack, the Roguelike game.
30
American computer programmer (born 1954)
Larry Arnold Wall, an American author, linguist and computer programmer, known for creating the patch tool and the Perl programming language.
Wikidata · Photo: Randal Schwartz from Portland, OR, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0
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31
American computer scientist (born 1940)
Alan Curtis Kay, an American computer scientist who pioneered object-oriented programming and the design of graphical user interfaces (GUI) with windows. At Xerox PARC he led the design and building of the first modern windowed desktop interface.
Wikidata · Photo: Marcin Wichary from San Francisco, U.S.A., CC BY 2.0
32
Japanese video game executive (1959–2015)
A businessman from Japan who was also a video game programmer and producer. He became Nintendo's fourth president in 2002, and also ran Nintendo of America as its CEO (chief executive officer) from 2013 until he died in 2015.
33
Indian American computer scientist
An Indian-American computer scientist and Hindutva historical revisionist. He is Regents Professor in Oklahoma State University–Stillwater's School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, holds an honorary visiting professorship in engineering at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and sits on the PM-STIAC, the advisory council on science, technology and innovation of India's Prime Minister.
Wikidata · Photo: KirstenRichards, CC BY-SA 3.0
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34
American computer programmer (1941–2016)
Raymond Samuel Tomlinson, an American computer programmer who in 1971 invented the first email program on ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet; it was the first system that let users on separate ARPANET hosts send each other mail. Until then, mail could go only to other users of the same computer.
Wikidata · Photo: Andreu Veà, WiWiW.org, CC BY-SA 3.0
English computer scientist
Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd, a British computer scientist who, working for IBM, invented the relational model for managing databases, the theory on which relational databases and their management systems rest. He won the ACM Turing Award for 1981.
36
American computer scientist (born 1989)
Katherine Louise Bouman, an American computer scientist and engineer in computational imaging. She headed work on an algorithm that images black holes, Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors (CHIRP), and was part of the Event Horizon Telescope team that took the first picture of a black hole.
Wikidata · Photo: Credit: NSF, Public domain
37
British computer scientist (1934–2026)
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare, known as Sir Tony Hoare or C. A. R. Hoare, a British computer scientist whose foundational contributions spanned concurrent computing, formal verification, operating systems, algorithms and programming languages. His work won him the ACM Turing Award for 1980, generally seen as computer science's highest honour.
38
Canadian computer scientist (born 1942)
Brian Wilson Kernighan, a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs and helped develop Unix with its creators, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson.
39
American computer scientist (1932–2020)
Frances Elizabeth Allen, an American computer scientist who pioneered optimising compilers. She was the first woman made an IBM Fellow, and in 2006 the first woman to win the Turing Award.
40
Azerbaijani scientist (1921–2017)
Lotfi Aliasger Zadeh, a mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist and AI researcher who taught computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for proposing fuzzy mathematics, a group of fuzzy concepts: fuzzy sets, logic, algorithms, semantics, languages, control, systems, probabilities, events and information.
Every Wikidata item that is a person whose one-line description on Wikidata calls them a computer scientist, a programmer or a computing pioneer — so that the entrepreneurs, activists and politicians Wikidata also records with the occupation are left out, and that has its own English Wikipedia article, ranked by the number of Wikimedia sites with a page about it — Wikipedia's language editions, mostly, and sister projects such as Wikiquote. That counts how many communities independently thought it worth describing, and nobody can buy a place on it. The top 40 are shown.
These belong on the list but Wikidata does not file them where the query looks:
Fetched from Wikidata on 2026-09-25. Each description is this site's summary of the entry's Wikipedia article, which its name links to: the wording is ours, the facts are Wikipedia's, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. To correct an entry, correct it there; the next refresh carries the change.
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