Alan Turing
1912 - 1954 (42 years)
Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of 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.
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Donald Knuth
1938 - Present (84 years)
Areas of Specialization: Computer Programming, Analysis of Algorithms Knuth is professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech). As an undergraduate at the Case Western Reserve University (then Case Institute of Technology), Knuth received the extraordinary honor of receiving his bachelor of science degree together with a master of science in mathematics based on the strength of his work at Case. He also helped redesign an early IBM computer while at Case, and made fundamental contributions ...
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Marvin Minsky
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Marvin Lee Minsky was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence , co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts concerning AI and philosophy.
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Claude Shannon
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as a "father of information theory". As a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship. Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis for national defense of the United States during World War II, including his fundamental work on codebreaking and secure telecommunications.
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John von Neumann
1903 - 1957 (54 years)
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. Von Neumann was regarded as perhaps the mathematician with the widest coverage of the subject in his time and was said to have been "the last representative of the great mathematicians who were equally at home in pure and applied mathematics". He integrated pure and applied sciences.
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Niklaus Wirth
1934 - Present (88 years)
Niklaus Emil Wirth is a Swiss computer scientist. He has designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science, for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.
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Herbert A. Simon
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
Herbert Alexander Simon was an American political scientist, with a Ph.D. in political science, whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978 and the Turing Award in computer science in 1975. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature and spanned across the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science.
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Allen Newell
1927 - 1992 (65 years)
Allen Newell was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology. He contributed to the Information Processing Language and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theory Machine and the General Problem Solver . He was awarded the ACM's A.M. Turing Award along with Herbert A. Simon in 1975 for their basic contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition.
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Richard Stallman
1953 - Present (69 years)
Richard Matthew Stallman , also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner, so that its users receive the freedoms to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public License.
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John McCarthy
1927 - 2011 (84 years)
John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. McCarthy was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence. He co-authored the document that coined the term "artificial intelligence" , developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized time-sharing, and invented garbage collection.
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Alan Kay
1940 - Present (82 years)
Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He is best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design. He was awarded the Turing award in 2003.
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Dennis Ritchie
1941 - 2011 (70 years)
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist. He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system and B programming language. Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He was the "R" in K&R C, and commonly known by his username dmr.
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Fred Brooks
1931 - Present (91 years)
Frederick Phillips "Fred" Brooks Jr. is an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software support package, then later writing candidly about the process in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month.
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Alonzo Church
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
Alonzo Church was an American mathematician and logician who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer science. He is best known for the lambda calculus, Church–Turing thesis, proving the unsolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem, Frege–Church ontology, and the Church–Rosser theorem. He also worked on philosophy of language . Alongside Alan Turing, Church has been considered one of the founders of computer science.
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Ken Thompson
1943 - Present (79 years)
Kenneth Lane Thompson is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-developed the Go programming language.
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Ivan Sutherland
1938 - Present (84 years)
Ivan Edward Sutherland is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His early work in computer graphics as well as his teaching with David C. Evans in that subject at the University of Utah in the 1970s was pioneering in the field. Sutherland, Evans, and their students from that era developed several foundations of modern computer graphics. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers.
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John Backus
1924 - 2007 (83 years)
John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form , a widely used notation to define formal language syntax. He later did research into the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"
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Seymour Papert
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Seymour Aubrey Papert was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at MIT. He was one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, and of the constructionist movement in education. He was co-inventor, with Wally Feurzeig and Cynthia Solomon, of the Logo programming language.
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Jeffrey Ullman
1942 - Present (80 years)
Ullman is Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He received a bachelor’s degree in engineering mathematics from Columbia University in 1963 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1968. In addition to his academic appointment at Stanford, Ullman has worked for Bell Labs and has been a professor of computer science at Princeton. Ullman is known as one of the world’s top database experts. He has also made substantial contributions to a field known as data mining, where statistical algorithms extract usable patterns from large collections of (typically) unstructured data.
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Brian Kernighan
1942 - Present (80 years)
Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan affirmed that he had no part in the design of the C language . He authored many Unix programs, including ditroff. Kernighan is coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The "K" of K&R C and of AWK both stand for "Kernighan".
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Kristen Nygaard
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Kristen Nygaard was a Norwegian computer scientist, programming language pioneer, and politician. Internationally, Nygaard is acknowledged as the co-inventor of object-oriented programming and the programming language Simula with Ole-Johan Dahl in the 1960s. Nygaard and Dahl received the 2001 A. M. Turing Award for their contribution to computer science.
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Peter Naur
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Peter Naur was a Danish computer science pioneer and Turing award winner. He is best remembered as a contributor, with John Backus, to the Backus–Naur form notation used in describing the syntax for most programming languages. He also contributed to creating the language ALGOL 60.
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Douglas Engelbart
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Douglas Carl Engelbart was an engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, which resulted in creation of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. Engelbart's law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him.
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Konrad Zuse
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Konrad Zuse was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse has often been regarded as the inventor of the modern computer.
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Edgar F. Codd
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd was an English computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases and relational database management systems. He made other valuable contributions to computer science, but the relational model, a very influential general theory of data management, remains his most mentioned, analyzed and celebrated achievement.
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Tony Hoare
1934 - Present (88 years)
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare is a British computer scientist who has made foundational contributions to programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification, and concurrent computing. His work earned him the Turing Award, usually regarded as the highest distinction in computer science, in 1980.
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Kurt Gödel
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Kurt Friedrich Gödel was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Frege.
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Bjarne Stroustrup
1950 - Present (72 years)
Stroustrup is currently visiting professor at Columbia University. Stroustrup received his master’s degree in computer science from Aarhus University in Denmark, and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in England. Stroustrup is also a managing director at Morgan Stanley in New York. Stroustrup achieved fame in computer science for his early work developing the C++ programming language. C++ has been widely adopted as an object-oriented language suitable for diverse programming tasks, from financial software to video games engines. With the publication of Stroustrup’s widely adopted textb...
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Edsger W. Dijkstra
1930 - 2002 (72 years)
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist, programmer, software engineer, systems scientist, science essayist, and pioneer in computing science. A theoretical physicist by training, he worked as a programmer at the Mathematisch Centrum from 1952 to 1962. A university professor for much of his life, Dijkstra held the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until his retirement in 1999. He was a professor of mathematics at the Eindhoven University of Technology and a research fellow at the Burroughs Corporation . In 1972, he ...
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Stephen Cole Kleene
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Stephen Cole Kleene was an American mathematician. One of the students of Alonzo Church, Kleene, along with Rózsa Péter, Alan Turing, Emil Post, and others, is best known as a founder of the branch of mathematical logic known as recursion theory, which subsequently helped to provide the foundations of theoretical computer science. Kleene's work grounds the study of computable functions. A number of mathematical concepts are named after him: Kleene hierarchy, Kleene algebra, the Kleene star , Kleene's recursion theorem and the Kleene fixed-point theorem. He also invented regular expressions in...
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Barbara Liskov
1939 - Present (83 years)
Liskov (née Barbara Huberman) is a computer scientist at MIT, where she is Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Institute Professor in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), where she leads the Programming Methodology Group. One of the first women in the US to earn a PhD in computer science, Liskov was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, the eldest of four siblings. In 2008, she won the Turing Award for her invention of the Liskov substitution principle, one of only three women to win that award so far (the other two are Fran Allen and Shafi Goldwasser).
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Yann LeCun
1960 - Present (62 years)
Areas of Specialization: Artifical Intelligence, Deep Learning Networks LeCun is one of the most important people in the subfield of computer science known as machine learning. In particular, he is one of the original scientists working on Deep Learning systems, which are enormously popular in work on Artificial Intelligence today. LeCun received his engineering degree from ESIEE Paris in 1983, and his Ph.D. from Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 1987. LeCun’s long career has been laser-focused on research on neural networks, actually an old technique in machine learning dating back almost t...
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Gerald Jay Sussman
1947 - Present (75 years)
Areas of Specialization: Artificial Intelligence, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned an S.B. and Ph.D. in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying under Seymour Papert. Sussman has made important contributions to artificial intelligence, creating strategies for handling dependencies, propagation of constraints and the refinement of almost-right plans. He has worked with Hal Abelson on the free software movement, which is focus...
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Linus Torvalds
1969 - Present (53 years)
Torvalds is world-famous for designing and developing the open-source Linux operating system. Born in Finland, Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki and received his master’s in Computer Science in 1996. Torvalds academic pursuits were temporarily suspended upon joining the Finnish Army, where he held the rank of Second Lieutenant. After his service, he began conceptualizing a scaled-down version of the massive UNIX operating system, which is still used for computer servers worldwide, and is the basis even for the Android operating system used in smartphones. His brainchild, Linux, came out in 1991 as an open-source alternative to UNIX or Microsoft Windows and MS-DOS.
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Geoffrey Hinton
1947 - Present (75 years)
Areas of Specialization: Artifical Intelligence, Deep Learning Hinton has been called one of the “Godfathers of Artificial Intelligence” by media sources for his work on a neural network system known as “Deep Learning.” He divides his year between working for Google Brain, the influential AI group at Google, and as a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto in Canada. Hinton, along with researchers David Rumelhart and Ronald Wilson, designed one of the key features in modern neural networks, a type of machine learning algorithm that learns from experience. In 1986, he publi...
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Tim Berners-Lee
1955 - Present (67 years)
Areas of Specialization: HTML, Invented World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee (also called “TimBL” or “TBL”) is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Berners-Lee is best known for inventing a markup language, the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) that has (of course) become the basis for Web pages. In a very real sense, Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web! And more. In 2016, Berners-Lee received the prestigious Turing Award for “for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fund...
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Terry Winograd
1946 - Present (76 years)
Terry Allen Winograd is an American professor of computer science at Stanford University, and co-director of the Stanford Human–Computer Interaction Group. He is known within the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence fields for his work on natural language using the SHRDLU program.
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Bertrand Meyer
1950 - Present (72 years)
Bertrand Meyer is a French academic, author, and consultant in the field of computer languages. He created the Eiffel programming language and the idea of design by contract. Education and academic career Bertrand Meyer received a master's degree in engineering from the École Polytechnique in Paris, a second master's degree from Stanford University, and a PhD from the Université de Nancy. He had a technical and managerial career for nine years at Électricité de France, and for three years was a member of the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Peter Norvig
1956 - Present (66 years)
Peter Norvig is an American computer scientist and Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He previously served as a director of research and search quality at Google. Norvig is the co-author with Stuart J. Russell of the most popular textbook in the field of AI: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries.
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Bill Joy
1954 - Present (68 years)
William Nelson Joy is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as Chief Scientist and CTO at the company until 2003.
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Charles Babbage
1791 - 1871 (80 years)
Charles Babbage was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer. Babbage is considered by some to be "father of the computer". Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, that eventually led to more complex electronic designs, though all the essential ideas of modern computers are to be found in Babbage's Analytical Engine, programmed using a principle openly borrowed from the Jacquard loom. Babbage had a broad range of interests in addition to his work on computers covered in his book Economy of Manufactures and Machinery.
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Douglas McIlroy
1932 - Present (90 years)
Malcolm Douglas McIlroy is a mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2019 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. McIlroy is best known for having originally proposed Unix pipelines and developed several Unix tools, such as spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, and tr. He was also one of the pioneering researchers of macro processorss and programming language extensibility. He participated in the design of multiple influential programming languages, particularly PL/I, SNOBOL, ALTRAN, TMG and C++.
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Alfred Aho
1941 - Present (81 years)
Alfred Vaino Aho is a Canadian computer scientist best known for his work on programming languages, compilers, and related algorithms, and his textbooks on the art and science of computer programming.
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Ada Lovelace
1815 - 1852 (37 years)
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and to have published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer.
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Jürgen Schmidhuber
1963 - Present (59 years)
Jürgen Schmidhuber is a computer scientist most noted for his work in the field of artificial intelligence, deep learning and artificial neural networks. He is a co-director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research in Lugano, in Ticino in southern Switzerland. Following Google Scholar, from 2016 to 2021 he has received more than 100,000 scientific citations. He has been referred to as "father of modern AI," "father of AI," "dad of mature AI," "Papa" of famous AI products, "Godfather," and "father of deep learning."
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Peter Chen
1947 - Present (75 years)
Peter Pin-Shan Chen is a Taiwanese American computer scientist. He is a distinguished career scientist and faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and Professor Emeritus at LSU. He is known for the development of the entity–relationship model in 1976.
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Edwin Catmull
1945 - Present (77 years)
Edwin Earl "Ed" Catmull is an American computer scientist who is the co-founder of Pixar and was the President of Walt Disney Animation Studios. He has been honored for his contributions to 3D computer graphics, including the 2019 ACM Turing Award.
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Christopher Strachey
1916 - 1975 (59 years)
Christopher S. Strachey was a British computer scientist. He was one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design and computer time-sharing. He has also been credited as possibly being the first developer of a video game. He was a member of the Strachey family, prominent in government, arts, administration, and academia.
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Michael I. Jordan
1956 - Present (66 years)
Michael Irwin Jordan is an American scientist, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and researcher in machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence. Jordan was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2010 for contributions to the foundations and applications of machine learning.
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Robert Tarjan
1948 - Present (74 years)
Robert Endre Tarjan is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the discoverer of several graph algorithms, including Tarjan's off-line lowest common ancestors algorithm, and co-inventor of both splay trees and Fibonacci heaps. Tarjan is currently the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, and the Chief Scientist at Intertrust Technologies Corporation.
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