Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier

Best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations, Fourier left an unfinished work on determinate equations which was edited by Claude-Louis...

Jerome Namias

Instrumental in ensuring that computer-generated forecasts resembled the real atmosphere for the numerical forecasting project using the supercomputer ENIAC at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, Namias was a U.S. meteorologist...

Léon Bollée

Inventor of the first calculating machine, Bollée began work in 1887 on three calculating machines: the Direct Multiplier, the Calculating Board, and the Arithmographe. Bollée's Multiplier was the second successful direct-multiplying calculator...

Klaus Samelson

A pioneer whose research led to a fundamental breakthrough in how computer systems are modeled and designed, Samelson also played a key role in the design of ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60....

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...

Christopher Latham Sholes

Inventor of the QWERTY keyboard and one of the first practical typewriters, Sholes transformed written communication. Born in Mooresburg, Pennsylvania, he moved to nearby Danville as a teenager, where he worked as...

Vladimir Kozmich Zworykin

Inventor of a television transmitting and receiving system employing cathode ray tubes, Zworykin was a Russian-American engineer and pioneer of television technology. He played a role in the practical development of television...

Isidor Isaac Rabi

Co-founder of CERN and Nobel laureate in Physics, Rabi was a Galician-born American physicist born into a traditional Jewish family in Rymanów, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Poland), and was brought to the United...

Blaise Pascal

Inventor of the Pascaline, a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction, Pascal built twenty of these machines over the following ten years after constructing the first in 1642 following three years...

Philibert Maurice d'Ocagne

Pioneer of nomography — the systematization of graphical calculation methods using nomograms — d'Ocagne was a French engineer and mathematician whose scientific personality soon fell into oblivion, leaving only a few milestones...

Abdal Mammad ibn M Khwrizm

Considered the founder of algebra, Khwrizm shared this credit with Diophantus. His Kitab al-Jabr wa-l-Muqabala presented the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations. In the twelfth century, Latin translations of...

Oswald Veblen

Involved in overseeing the World War II work that produced the pioneering ENIAC electronic digital computer, Veblen was also an American mathematician, geometer, and topologist whose work found application in atomic physics...

Morton M. Astrahan

Developer of the SAGE air-defense computer and a pioneer in relational database systems, Astrahan joined IBM in 1949 and spent his entire professional career there—first at the Endicott Laboratory and then later...

Gregory Bateson

A pioneer in extending systems theory and cybernetics to the social and behavioral sciences, Bateson had a natural ability to recognize order and pattern in the universe. In the 1940s he helped...

Herbert Franz Mataré

Co-developer of the first functional "European" transistor, Mataré made his landmark contribution alongside Heinrich Welker in the vicinity of Paris in 1948, at the same time and independently from the Bell Labs...

Alexander Bain

Inventor of the electric clock and pioneer of the telegraph, Bain transformed early communications technology. His first patent was dated January 11, 1841, and was in the names of John Barwise, chronometer...

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Discoverer of the binary number system and independent co-inventor of infinitesimal calculus, Leibniz occupied a prominent place in the history of mathematics and the history of philosophy. He developed the infinitesimal calculus...

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...

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...

Erwin Tomash

Early pioneer of computer equipment peripherals and co-developer of the ERA 1103 (UNIVAC Scientific), Tomash was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and graduated from the University of Minnesota with an...