Historic Computer Science Figures

Who do you think are the most important people to know about in computer science?

Aside from the obvious choices like Turing and von Neumann, Knuth and McCarthy are easy picks. I'd also list Engelbart, even though his work wasn't exactly computer science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse invented the computer.

The Sussman

Terry A. Davis

Alonzo Church - invented functional programming.
John McCarthy - founded AI, Lisp and garbage collection.
Alan Kay - basically continued where McCarthy left with Lisp.
Gerald Sussman - wrote awesome CS book, that quickly introduces reader to major concepts.
Marvin Minsky - did a lot of research on neural networks, robotics and popularized AI concepts in his books.

Nikita Sadkov

>>7
make your're are game

>>6
Also,
Ivan Sutherland - pioneered computer graphics

Computer Science is science for niggers

>>10
go away

>>11
``No.''

Ada Byron, of course

Also, Bill Jobs that invented the modern computer and Al Gore who perfected the concept of the Algoreithm.

Steve Jobs
Simon Peyote Jones
Anal Touring
rms
Mark Zuckerberg

Noam "The Khmer Rouge did nothing wrong" Chomsky

>>15
What contribution to computer science Chomsky did..checks wikipedia
He continued to receive academic recognition and honors for his work, in 1966 visiting a variety of Californian institutions, first as the Linguistics Society of America Professor at the University of California, and then as the Beckman Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.[80] His Beckman lectures would be assembled and published as Language and Mind in 1968.[81] In this period, military scientists were also interested in Chomsky’s linguistics. As former Air Force Colonel, Anthony Debons, said: "much of the research conducted at MIT by Chomsky and his colleagues [has] direct application to the efforts undertaken by military scientists to develop … languages for computer operations in military command and control systems."[82] Indeed, between 1963 and 1965, Chomsky was a consultant for a military sponsored project "to establish natural language as an operational language for command and control." One of Chomsky's students who also worked on this project, Barbara Partee, says that this research was justified to the military on the basis that "in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things, and that it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program."[83]

>>16
However, these scientists eventually found Chomsky’s theories unworkable for their computer systems. Other subsequent difficulties with the theories led to various debates between Chomsky and his critics that came to be known as the "Linguistics Wars", although they revolved largely around debating philosophical issues rather than linguistics proper.[84]

The Chomsky hierarchy, sometimes referred to as the Chomsky-Schützenberger hierarchy, is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars. The hierarchy imposes a logical structure across different language classes and provides a basis for understanding the relationship between grammars (devices that enumerate the valid sentences within languages). In order of increasing expressive power it includes regular (or Type-3) grammars, context-free (or Type-2) grammars, context-sensitive (or Type-1) grammars, and recursively enumerable (or Type-0) grammars. Each class is a strict subset of the class above it, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages (infinite sets of strings composed from finite sets of symbols, or alphabets) than the one below.[194] In addition to being important in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy is also relevant in theoretical computer science, especially in programming language theory,[195] compiler construction, and automata theory.[196]

>>14

Computer Science Figures
Steve Jobs
Mark Zuckerberg

Wut? What research they published?

Simon Peyote Jones

He isn't historic yet.

rms

Stallman is a commie, not a scientist.

>>16

it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program.

Implying Russian high ranking officers are any smarter.

>>18
isn't Stallman more of an anarchist though?

>>20
Nope. He said government should control software development. He also loves Russia.

>>21
source please, and make your're are game

>>19
I don't think that was implied.

>>22
See his old interviews, where they asked him who should fund development and maintenance, if private ownership over software is banned. He said that government will do funding.

>>24
Stallman is right about proprietary stuff and the GNU GPL and all, but he says a lot of loony shit and nobody should listen to his other opinions.

>>24
While he's right, it doesn't reflect his current views, where you can effectively own software and provide access to it for a price, as long as you give the full source code to your clients who use it.

>>26
His views are outdated. Nowadays, you don't just own software. Platform as a Service, Software as a Service... you're paying to use some cloud-based thing. The days of everything being offline and only on your desktop are long gone. We are all connected.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n094FK1dG8s

>>27
Allegro GPL fixes this.