John Napier

Renowned as the discoverer of the logarithm and inventor of "Napier's bones," Napier was a Scottish mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and astrologer, and also the 8th Laird of Merchiston. He was the son...

Henryk Zygalski

Designer of the "perforated sheets," also known as "Zygalski sheets," a manual device for finding Enigma settings, Zygalski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who worked at breaking German Enigma ciphers before...

Vilhelm Friman Koren Bjerknes

His experiments with electric oscillations contributed much to the development of wireless telegraphy. Bjerknes was a Norwegian physicist and meteorologist who did much to found the modern practice of weather forecasting. He...

Albert W. Tucker

Developer of the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions, a basic result in non-linear programming, Tucker was a Canadian-born American mathematician who also made important contributions in topology and game theory. Born in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada,...

Joseph (J. J.) John Thomson

Discoverer of the electron and isotopes, and inventor of the mass spectrometer, Thomson was a British physicist and Nobel laureate born in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England. His early education took place in...

Michael Faraday

A father of electromagnetism and electronics, Faraday studied the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a DC electric current. While conducting these studies, he established the basis for the electromagnetic field concept...

Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet

Considered one of the fathers of information science, Otlet was an author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer, and peace activist whose writings have sometimes been called prescient of the current World Wide Web. He...

Federico Luigi Conte Menabrea

Author of the landmark 1842 "Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq." — translated and annotated by Ada Lovelace — which described many aspects of computer architecture and programming,...

René Descartes

Credited as the father of analytical geometry, Descartes built the bridge between algebra and geometry that proved crucial to the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. The Cartesian coordinate system—allowing algebraic equations...

Isaac Newton

Stating the three universal laws of motion that enabled many of the advances of the Industrial Revolution and are still the underpinnings of the non-relativistic technologies of the modern world, Newton also...

Dorr Eugene Felt

Inventor of the Comptometer, the first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculator, Felt built his first prototype during the US Thanksgiving holidays of 1884. Because of his limited amount of money, he used...

Marian Adam Rejewski

Solver of the plugboard-equipped Enigma machine, the main cipher device used by Germany, Rejewski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who accomplished this feat in 1932. His success, along with his colleagues...

Elisha Gray

Best known for his development of a telephone prototype in 1876, Gray is considered by some writers to be the true inventor of the variable resistance telephone, despite losing out to Alexander...

Francis Bacon

Considered the father of the scientific method and of empiricism, Bacon transformed natural philosophy and the theory of knowledge. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Although his...

William (Bill) Thomas Tutte

A foundational figure in combinatorics and graph theory, Tutte performed significant work in fields with many applications in computer science, and is credited with helping create graph theory in its modern form....

Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen

Famous for constructing The Turk, a chess-playing automaton later revealed to be a hoax, Kempelen was also a Hungarian author and inventor with Irish ancestors, born in Pressburg, Kingdom of Hungary, Habsburg...

Thomas Alva Edison

Credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications, Edison also developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera,...

Leonardo Torres y Quevedo

Pioneer in remote control technology, Torres y Quevedo developed the Telekino — a robot that executed commands transmitted by electromagnetic waves — presenting it at the Paris Academy of Science in 1903. A...

Klara Dan von Neumann

One of the first computer programmers in history, Klára Dán von Neumann was also the first woman to execute modern-style code on a computer. A Hungarian-American mathematician and self-taught engineer, she made...

Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci

Among those who designed a calculator, da Vinci stands as one of history's most remarkable minds — an Italian polymath regarded as the epitome of the "Renaissance Man", displaying skills in numerous...