Francis (Frank) E. Hamilton

Responsible for the primary organization, design, and construction of the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Mark I) and the IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), Hamilton was a pivotal figure in early computing....

Warren Weaver

Writer of the memorandum "Translation" (July 1949), said to be probably the single most influential publication in the early days of machine translation, Weaver was an American scientist, mathematician, and science administrator...

William Oughtred

Credited as the inventor of the slide rule in 1622, Oughtred was the first to use two logarithmic scales sliding by one another to perform direct multiplication and division. Oughtred also introduced the...

Philip Stuart Milner-Barry

One of four leading codebreakers at Bletchley Park to petition Prime Minister Winston Churchill directly for more resources for their work, Milner-Barry was also a British chess player, chess writer, and civil...

Pierre Jaquet-Droz

Creator of animated dolls, or automata, devices which some consider to be the oldest examples of the computer, Jaquet-Droz lived in Paris, London, and Geneva, where he designed and built these mechanisms...

Johannes Kepler

Best known for his eponymous laws of planetary motion, Kepler was a German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer and a key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution. His laws were codified by...

Charles Proteus Steinmetz

Fostering the development of alternating current that made possible the expansion of the electric power industry in the United States, Steinmetz was a mathematician and electrical engineer who formulated mathematical theories for...

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....

Leopold Kronecker

A contributor to the concept of continuity and the reconstruction of irrational numbers in real numbers, Kronecker was a German mathematician who worked on number theory and algebra. He was born in...

Guglielmo Marconi

Known as the father of long distance radio transmission, Marconi was an Italian inventor celebrated for his development of Marconi's law and a radio telegraph system. Although he is often accredited as...

Ruth Teitelbaum (née Lichterman)

One of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer, Teitelbaum played a pivotal role in the rise of computers. She graduated from Hunter College with a B.Sc. in Mathematics and was hired...

Allan Marquand

Builder of a mechanical logical machine that is still extant, Marquand is described as having created "…mills into which the premises are fed and which turn out the conclusions by the revolution...

Herman Hollerith

Inventor of the punched card, Hollerith was a German-American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the...

Shaun Wylie

A key member of Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, Wylie worked alongside Alan Turing on solving the Enigma machine as used by the German Navy. He was born in Oxford, England, the...

Joseph Henry

Inventor of the electromagnetic relay that formed the basis of the electrical telegraph, Henry was also the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a founding member of the National Institute for...

Edvard Georg Raphael Scheutz

Co-developer of the Scheutzian calculation engine that produced the first tables calculated and printed by machinery, Scheutz made pioneering contributions to mechanical computation alongside his father, Pehr George Scheutz. He began his...

Lee de Forest

Inventor of the audion triode and audio and radio pioneer, De Forest had an interest in wireless telegraphy and invented the Audion in 1906. He then developed an improved wireless telegraph receiver....

Willgodt Theophil Odhner

Inventor of one of the most popular portable mechanical calculators, Odhner based his solution on a geared pinwheel mechanism, resulting in the well-known barrel-shaped calculating machines bearing his name. Although calculating machines...

Hewitt D. Crane

Developer of an eye-movement tracking device and pen-input device for computers, Crane was an American engineer best known for his pioneering work at SRI International on ERMA (Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting), for...

Martin Wiberg

Inventor of a machine that could print logarithmic tables, Wiberg is known as a computer pioneer for his 1875 invention of a device the size of a sewing machine. The tables were...