36 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
American computer scientist who invented object-oriented programming, the Dynabook concept (the first laptop/tablet vision), and Smalltalk at Xerox PARC — one of the most visionary computer scientists in history, whose ideas about personal computing and education shaped the next 50 years of the field.
British mathematician who invented theoretical computer science (the Turing machine, 1936), broke the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park during WWII, and proposed the Turing Test for machine intelligence (1950) — before being prosecuted for homosexuality and dying in 1954.
American computer scientist and former Google VP of engineering, known for leading Google's search infrastructure work and later co-founding Apprente (acquired by McDonald's) and Argo AI work.
Douglas Engelbart's 1962 report to DARPA arguing that the most important use of computers is augmenting human intellectual capabilities — not automating existing tasks but expanding what humans can think and do — laying the philosophical foundation for personal computing.
American industrial research laboratory operated by AT&T that produced more fundamental technological breakthroughs per decade than any other institution in history — including the transistor, information theory, the laser, Unix, and C.
American computer scientist who joined Renaissance Technologies from IBM, co-developed language models for speech recognition, became co-CEO of RenTec, and used his enormous wealth to fund right-wing political causes including Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica.
Charles Petzold's 1999 account of how computers work at the deepest level — from Morse code and Braille through logic gates, flip-flops, and machine language to operating systems — the clearest explanation of computation for non-engineers.
American computer scientist and founder of D.E. Shaw & Co., one of the first and most successful quantitative hedge funds, which used computational methods to identify statistical arbitrage opportunities across financial markets.
American computer scientist at Yale — author of Mirror Worlds and The Muse in the Machine — one of the pioneers of parallel computing (Linda language) — who was nearly killed by a Unabomber mail bomb in 1993 — who has written extensively on American culture and the internet.
American computer scientist who served as Nvidia's first Chief Scientist from 1997 to 2009 — contributing to the technical architecture of Nvidia's graphics processors and GPU computing platform.
American inventor and engineer who invented the computer mouse, developed hypertext and groupware, created the GUI concept, and gave 'The Mother of All Demos' (1968) — demonstrating word processing, video conferencing, hypertext, and collaborative real-time editing 40 years before they became mainstream.
A logical framework combining epistemic logic with dynamic logic to model how agents' knowledge and beliefs change in response to communication, observation, and action.
American computer scientist who developed BrookGPU at Stanford — an early attempt at using GPUs for general computation — and was recruited by Jensen Huang to lead the development of CUDA, the programming framework that made Nvidia GPUs programmable for applications beyond graphics.
French-American astrophysicist and computer scientist who in the 1960s proposed the first computer database of UFO reports and developed the control system hypothesis — arguing that UFO phenomena are a real phenomenon but likely not extraterrestrial spacecraft, instead functioning as a control mechanism that shapes human consciousness and culture.
French-American computer scientist, venture capitalist, and UAP researcher who pioneered the 'interdimensional hypothesis' — that UAPs are not alien spacecraft but manifestations of an unknown phenomenon that interacts with human consciousness and has done so throughout history.
American computer scientist — Google Fellow and Chief Scientist of Google DeepMind — who co-created Google's core infrastructure (MapReduce, BigTable, TensorFlow) and led Google Brain — the most important engineer in Google's history.
American computer scientist — President of Stanford University (2000–2016) — co-inventor of the RISC architecture — co-author of Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach — Chairman of Alphabet — one of the most influential figures in both computer architecture and university leadership.
American computer scientist who coined the term 'artificial intelligence' (1955), organized the Dartmouth Workshop (1956) that launched AI as a research field, invented the Lisp programming language (1958), and developed the concept of time-sharing computing.
German mathematician who developed computable analysis — a rigorous treatment of computability for real numbers and continuous functions — and the Weihrauch reducibility hierarchy.
Guatemalan-American computer scientist and CEO of Duolingo, inventor of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, who applied behavioral psychology and game mechanics to language learning — creating the most downloaded education app in the world.
American computer scientist who worked on speech recognition and natural language processing at IBM before joining Renaissance Technologies — where he eventually became co-CEO and dramatically expanded the computing infrastructure behind the Medallion Fund.
French computer scientist who has contributed to the Coq proof assistant — particularly the extraction mechanism that generates executable programs from formal proofs.
Dutch-Australian computer scientist who has worked on the logic of knowledge and deontic logic in the context of artificial intelligence and security.
American computer scientist and Google Fellow, Jeff Dean's long-time coding partner, co-inventor of MapReduce, Bigtable, and Google File System — the infrastructure that defined the era of large-scale distributed computing.
The pseudonymous person or group who published the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008 and launched the Bitcoin network in 2009 — before disappearing in 2011 — creating the first decentralized cryptocurrency and triggering the entire blockchain and crypto industry.
American theoretical computer scientist at UT Austin — the most prominent academic commentator on quantum computing's actual capabilities and limitations — author of Quantum Computing Since Democritus — blogger (Shtetl-Optimized) — who worked at OpenAI on AI safety.
Russian-American computer scientist and co-founder of Google, responsible for much of the early algorithmic and infrastructure work that made Google's search engine technically superior.
German computer scientist who has contributed to the Isabelle proof assistant and to the formalization of mathematics in type theory.
British-American computer scientist at UC Berkeley, co-author of the standard AI textbook (Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach), and author of Human Compatible — which argues for a new paradigm of AI development based on uncertainty about human preferences.
American information technologist who coined the terms 'hypertext' and 'hypermedia' (1963) and spent 50 years developing Project Xanadu — an idealized hypertext system with two-way links and automatic micropayment — whose concepts deeply influenced the World Wide Web (though the Web implemented them incompletely in his view).
American computer scientist and Stanford professor, Larry Page's doctoral advisor, best known for his 1971 SHRDLU natural language program and his later work on human-computer interaction design.
Tim Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN.
Public research university in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois — one of America's leading engineering and computer science schools — whose alumni include Marc Andreessen (Netscape, a16z), YouTube co-founders, and numerous other technology company founders.
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, which from 1970–1985 produced the graphical user interface, Ethernet, laser printing, object-oriented programming, and the modern PC concept — inventions Xerox largely failed to commercialize.
Scott Aaronson's wide-ranging tour of quantum computing's foundational questions — from ancient Greek atomism through computational complexity to quantum mechanics and consciousness.
American mathematician and science fiction author who coined the term 'technological singularity' and wrote foundational hard SF novels — including A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky.