Some heros in the world of computer science.

Founding Fathers (pre 1960)⌗

George Boole (1815 - 1864)⌗

Boolean algegra. Papers The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847), and An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854).

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (1848 - 1925)⌗

Analytic philosophy. Developed modern logic in the Begriffsschrift and work in the foundations of mathematics. Books The Foundations of Arithmetic, On Sense and Reference and The Thought.

Alan Turing (1912 - 1954)⌗

The father of theoretical computer science. Formalised the concepts of algorithm and computation through the notion of a Universal Machine (i.e Turing Machine) in his seminal paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.

John von Neumann (1903 - 1957)⌗

Implementer of the “Turing Machine”.

Mauris Wilks⌗

EDSAC, the first practical implementation of von-neumann architecture.

Golden Age (1960-90)⌗

Tony Hoare (1934)⌗

Hoare logic (for verifying correctness), formalised the interaction of concurrent processes with communicating sequential processes (CSP), and invented the quicksort algorithm.

John McCarthy⌗

Creator of LISP. First dynamic language.

Ken Thompson⌗

Unix. The B programming language. The Go programming language. Co-creator of the Plan 9 operating system. Regular expressions, UTF-8 encoding, and text editors QED and ed.

Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011)⌗

The C programming language and Unix. Commonly known by his username dmr.

Douglas McIlroy (1932)⌗

Unix pipes, and software componentization.

Bill Joy⌗

BSD and vi. Paper Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us.

Joe Armstrong⌗

Erlang. Fault tolerant distributed systems.

Alan Kay⌗

OO. SmallTalk. Squeak.

Larry Wall⌗

Perl.

Richard Stallman⌗

GNU (GNU Not UNIX).

Linus Torvalds⌗

The Linux kernel and Git.

David Cutler⌗

VMS and Windows NT kernel.

Rob Pike⌗

golang, SysV, X Windows.

Rich Hickey⌗

Clojure.

Internet Age (1990 - 2000)⌗

Robert Griesemer⌗

Golang.

Bryan Cantrill⌗

DTrace.