# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published September 28, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-14-most-influential-people-in-computing-history*

---

## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Alan Turing** — score 1000/1000
   British mathematician whose 1936 paper defined the theoretical computer and who helped break Enigma.
2. **Tim Berners-Lee** — score 841/1000
   British scientist who invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989.
3. **Margaret Hamilton** — score 841/1000
   Software engineer who led the team that wrote the flight software for the Apollo moon landings.
4. **Dennis Ritchie** — score 600/1000
   Bell Labs scientist who created the C language and co-created Unix.
5. **Claude Shannon** — score 529/1000
   Father of information theory, who showed how circuits can do logic with ones and zeros.
6. **Steve Wozniak** — score 529/1000
   Engineer who single-handedly designed the Apple I and Apple II computers.
7. **Vint Cerf** — score 448/1000
   Co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols that the internet runs on.
8. **Donald Knuth** — score 448/1000
   Stanford professor who wrote The Art of Computer Programming and created the TeX typesetting system.
9. **Grace Hopper** — score 448/1000
   US Navy rear admiral who built the first compiler and shaped the COBOL language.
10. **Bill Gates** — score 241/1000
   Microsoft co-founder whose MS-DOS and Windows ran most of the world's PCs.
11. **Charles Babbage** — score 240/1000
   English inventor who designed the Analytical Engine, a mechanical general-purpose computer.
12. **Steve Jobs** — score 240/1000
   Apple co-founder who brought the graphical personal computer, the iPod and the iPhone to the mass market.
13. **Ada Lovelace** — score 240/1000
   Nineteenth-century mathematician who wrote what is considered the first computer program.
14. **Linus Torvalds** — score 0/1000
   Finnish engineer who created the Linux kernel and the Git version-control system.

Tags: historical figures, science, tech, internet, steve jobs, computing