Better Than Bacon · CC BY 2.0

An Israeli-American computer scientist who reshaped artificial intelligence by developing Bayesian networks, the framework that made probabilistic reasoning tractable for machines, and later built a formal calculus for causal and counterfactual inference — the mathematics of asking not just what correlates, but what would happen if. The Association for Computing Machinery awarded him the 2011 Turing Award, computing's highest honor, for that work. He is the father of journalist Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002, a loss that led Judea Pearl into public advocacy against extremism.