People

A list of people who did significant contributions in the field of computer science and software engineering. In no specific order.

• Alan Turing - developed theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.

  • In 2013, I wrote a Malayalam article about him and his contributions

• Fabrice Bellard: known for creating FFmpeg, QEMU, and Tiny C Compiler software projects. He developed Bellard's formula for calculating single digits of pi.

  • Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a Super-Productive Programmer(2011)

  • English wikipedia article

  • A small C program to print the biggest prime number

  • ACM Journal Article

• Kurt Gödel - Theoretical foundations on computability. Gödel published his two incompleteness theorems in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any self-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the natural numbers that cannot be proved from the axioms. To prove this theorem, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers.

  • What Gödel Discovered: https://stopa.io/post/269

  • Kurt Gödel’s Brilliant Madness

• John von Neumann - Von Neumann made major contributions to many fields, including mathematics (foundations of mathematics, functional analysis, ergodic theory, representation theory, operator algebras, geometry, topology, and numerical analysis), physics (quantum mechanics, hydrodynamics, and quantum statistical mechanics), economics (game theory), computing (Von Neumann architecture, linear programming, self-replicating machines, stochastic computing), and statistics.

  • He was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics in the development of functional analysis, and a key figure in the development of game theory and the concepts of cellular automata, the universal constructor and the digital computer.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture

  • https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-unparalleled-genius-of-john-von-neumann-791bb9f42a2d

• Edsger W. Dijkstra: Edsger Dijkstra- The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

  Krzysztof Apt

• Claude Shannon: How Claude Shannon Invented the Future

Links

• Github's Readme project is profiling famous or influential opensource contributors