The 14 Most Influential People in Computing History

Codebreakers, compiler pioneers and the people who put a computer in every pocket. Pick who changed how the world computes.

1. 1
   Alan Turing

   British mathematician whose 1936 paper defined the theoretical computer and who helped break Enigma.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Tim Berners-Lee

   British scientist who invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989.
   841pts
3. 3
   Margaret Hamilton

   Software engineer who led the team that wrote the flight software for the Apollo moon landings.
   841pts
4. 4
   Dennis Ritchie

   Bell Labs scientist who created the C language and co-created Unix.
   600pts
5. 5
   Claude Shannon

   Father of information theory, who showed how circuits can do logic with ones and zeros.
   529pts
6. 6
   Steve Wozniak

   Engineer who single-handedly designed the Apple I and Apple II computers.
   529pts
7. 7
   Vint Cerf

   Co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols that the internet runs on.
   448pts
8. 8
   Donald Knuth

   Stanford professor who wrote The Art of Computer Programming and created the TeX typesetting system.
   448pts
9. 9
   Grace Hopper

   US Navy rear admiral who built the first compiler and shaped the COBOL language.
   448pts
10. 10
    Bill Gates

    Microsoft co-founder whose MS-DOS and Windows ran most of the world's PCs.
    241pts
11. 11
    Charles Babbage

    English inventor who designed the Analytical Engine, a mechanical general-purpose computer.
    240pts
12. 12
    Steve Jobs

    Apple co-founder who brought the graphical personal computer, the iPod and the iPhone to the mass market.
    240pts
13. 13
    Ada Lovelace

    Nineteenth-century mathematician who wrote what is considered the first computer program.
    240pts
14. 14
    Linus Torvalds

    Finnish engineer who created the Linux kernel and the Git version-control system.
    0pts

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