Field
Technology
95 figures, most prominent first.
Moxie Marlinspike
created the Signal Protocol
b. c. 1980
J. Robert Oppenheimer
American theoretical physicist
1904 – 1967
John von Neumann
computer architecture, game theory
1903 – 1957
Mark Zuckerberg
founder of Facebook
b. 1984
Hedy Lamarr
film star; invented frequency hopping
1914 – 2000
Bobby Fischer
American chess player
1943 – 2008
Sam Altman
chief executive of OpenAI
b. 1985
- ET
Edward Teller
Hungarian-American Jewish nuclear physicist
1908 – 2003
Larry Ellison
founder of Oracle
b. 1944
Larry Page
co-founder of Google
b. 1973
Sergey Brin
co-founder of Google
b. 1973
Dario Amodei
co-founder of Anthropic
b. 1983
Herbert A. Simon
American political scientist, economist, sociologist
1916 – 2001
John McCarthy
American computer scientist and cognitive scientist
1927 – 2011
- MM
Marvin Minsky
founded the MIT AI Lab
1927 – 2016
Ray Kurzweil
built the first reading machine
b. 1948
Richard Stallman
launched GNU and the GPL
b. 1953
Ilya Sutskever
co-founder of OpenAI
b. 1986
Steve Ballmer
American businessman, former chief executive officer of M
b. 1956
Yoshua Bengio
Turing Award, deep learning pioneer
b. 1964
George Dantzig
American mathematician
1914 – 2005
Norbert Wiener
American mathematician
1894 – 1964
Emile Berliner
Invented the flat gramophone disc record
1851 – 1929
Fritz Haber
German chemist and receiver of the Nobel prize
1868 – 1934
Lev Landau
Soviet theoretical physicist
1908 – 1968
Alan Sugar
British business magnate, media personality
b. 1947
Michael Dell
American businessman and CEO
b. 1965
Theodore von Kármán
Hungarian-American mathematician
1881 – 1963
Hilary Putnam
American philosopher and mathematician
1926 – 2016
Albert Sabin
Jewish-Polish-American physician and epidemiologist who d
1906 – 1993
Benoit Mandelbrot
Polish-born, French and American mathematician
1924 – 2010
Eliezer Yudkowsky
AI risk researcher, founded MIRI
b. 1979
- NS
Noam Shazeer
co-authored the transformer
b. 1976
Jacky Rosen
American politician
b. 1957
Joshua Lederberg
American molecular biologist
1925 – 2008
Daniel Bell
American sociologist
1919 – 2011
Ruth Handler
American businesswoman
1916 – 2002
Adi Shamir
the S in RSA encryption
b. 1952
Leo Szilard
Hungarian-American Jewish physicist and inventor
1898 – 1964
Marc Benioff
Founded Salesforce
b. 1964
Mikhail Botvinnik
Soviet chess player
1911 – 1995
Stephen Wolfram
British-American scientist and businessman
b. 1959
Adam Mosseri
Head of Instagram
b. 1983
David Deutsch
British physicist
b. c. 1953
Melvin Calvin
American biochemist
1911 – 1997
- MD
Mildred Dresselhaus
American physicist
1930 – 2017
Dennis Gabor
Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor of holography
1900 – 1979
Joseph Weizenbaum
German-American computer scientist
1923 – 2008
Élie Metchnikoff
Russian-French immunologist, embryologist, biologist
1845 – 1916
Rashid al-Din Hamadani
Persian physician and historian
c. 1247 – 1318
Hugo Gernsback
American inventor, writer, editor and publisher
1884 – 1967
Dan Shechtman
Israeli scientist
b. 1941
Gabriel Lippmann
luxembourgish physicist nationalized French
1845 – 1921
Jim Simons
American mathematician and hedge fund manager
1938 – 2024
Noga Alon
Israeli mathematician
b. 1956
Robert Kahn
American Internet pioneer, computer scientist
b. 1938
Shafi Goldwasser
American computer scientist
b. 1958
Vitaly Ginzburg
Russian physicist
1916 – 2009
Yakov Zeldovich
Soviet physicist, physical chemist and cosmologist
1914 – 1987
- LL
Leslie Lamport
American computer scientist
b. 1941
Barbara Liskov
American computer scientist
b. 1939
Max Levchin
Co-founded PayPal; invented the CAPTCHA test
b. 1975
Baruch Samuel Blumberg
American physician, geneticist and Nobel prize winner
1925 – 2011
Leonard Adleman
the A in RSA encryption
b. 1945
Zhores Alferov
Soviet-Russian physicist
1930 – 2019
Ralph Henry Baer
Invented the home video game console
1922 – 2014
- AP
Alan Perlis
American computer scientist
1922 – 1990
Martin Lewis Perl
American scientist
1927 – 2014
Patri Friedman
American libertarian activist and theorist of political e
b. 1976
Richard M. Karp
American theoretical computer scientist
b. 1935
Al-Samawal al-Maghribi
Muslim mathematician, astronomer and physician
c. 1130 – c. 1180
Alan J. Heeger
American chemist, physicist
b. 1936
Ernestine Rose
American feminist activist
1810 – 1892
- LL
Liviu Librescu
Romanian-Israeli-American scientist and Holocaust survivor
1930 – 2007
Donald Glaser
American physicist and neurobiologist
1926 – 2013
- HM
Harris Mowbray
braille-related Linguist
b. c. 1999
Larry Tesler
invented cut, copy and paste
1945 – 2020
- PL
Paul Lévy
French mathematician
1886 – 1971
- WK
William Kahan
Canadian mathematician and computer scientist
b. 1933
- AY
Amnon Yariv
American electrical engineer
b. 1930
Jan Koum
Co-founded WhatsApp
b. 1976
Arkady Volozh
Co-founder of Yandex and Nebius
b. 1964
- VV
Vladimir Vapnik
co-invented the support-vector machine
b. 1936
Joel Spolsky
co-founder of Stack Overflow
b. 1965
Abraham Lempel
co-invented data compression
1936 – 2023
Jacob Ziv
co-invented data compression
b. 1931
Mária Telkes
Hungarian–American scientist and inventor
1900 – 1995
- RS
Ray Solomonoff
founded algorithmic probability
1926 – 2009
Andi Gutmans
Co-developer of PHP 3 and the Zend Engine
b. c. 1972
- JG
John G. Kemeny
Jewish-Hungarian American mathematician, computer scientist
1926 – 1992
Zeev Suraski
Co-developer of PHP 3 and the Zend Engine
b. 1976
Jon Oringer
Founder of Shutterstock
b. 1974
Russell Kirsch
scanned the first digital image
1929 – 2020
Jonathan Medved
Founder of OurCrowd
b. 1955
Elena Bunina
Mathematician and former Yandex executive
b. 1976