Charles Babbage

Born: December 26,1791 in London, United Kingdom

Died: October 18, 1871 in London, United Kingdom

Country: Great Britain

Scientific Field(s): Math

Short Bio

Casually referred to as the "father of computing," Charles Babbage was kind-of a brilliant mathematician. Like, went to Oxford and discovered that he was better at math than his tutors kind of brilliant. Yeah, we know. Babbage founded two different math-based societies—all before the age of thirty.

Oh yeah, and he also happened to invent the proto-computer: the Analytical Engine, which was supposed to act as a general symbol manipulator. He never actually made it work, but his designs influenced a brilliant mathematician named Ada Lovelace. Together they laid the mechanical and conceptual foundation for programming. All that was left was physically building computers to be programmed.
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Ada Lovelace

Born: December 10, 1815 in London, United Kingdom

Died: November 27, 1852 in London, United Kingdom

Country: United Kingdom

Scientific Field(s): Math

Short Bio

Who'd have thought that the daughter of Lord Byron would grow up to be a brilliant mathematician? Lady Byron, actually, seeing as she actively had Ada tutored in math and music to keep her from becoming a [gasp] Romantic poet.

She did many things in her short 37 years, but Lovelace is best known for her work translating and annotating Charles Babbage's Analytic Engine. In her annotations, she saw the vast potential of a machine that could take arbitrary values and calculate solutions. She even prophesized the creation of computer-generated music. (Source)

John Von Neumann

Born: December 28, 1903 in Budapest, Hungary

Died: February 8, 1957, in Washington D.C., United States

Country: Hungary (1903 – 1930), United States (1930 – 1957)

Scientific Field(s): Applied Math, Computer Engineering

Short Bio

Being a child prodigy's tough—especially when you're born to a Jewish family in Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. Still, von Neumann's intelligence was nothing short of genius. His first published paper (written when he was 20) gave a definition of ordinal numbers that we still use today. We won't even begin to describe his work in Physics or Economics, but it's amazing.

While working on the ENIAC, von Neumann came up with the idea that we could let the computer store data instead of having to feed it every piece of information. Oh yeah, he also pioneered modern mathematical modeling, so professors no longer needed to climb to the roof to figure out how a hydrogen bomb would detonate. Not bad, Johnny. (Source)

Grace Hopper

Born: December 9, 1906 in New York City, United States

Died: January 1, 1992 in Arlington, Virginia, United States

Country: United States

Scientific Field(s): Computer Science

Short Bio

If necessity is the mother of invention, Grace Hopper is the mother of the compilers. This powerhouse had a BA, MA, and PhD in Mathematics under her belt by 1934—a time when most women were expected to go to college to get their MRS.

She spent some time in academia, but the majority of her groundbreaking work was done for the U.S. Navy. Not only did she help develop the first compiler to convert math notation into computer language, but she also taught a computer twenty instructions in English. This inspired her to try developing a complete language written in English and converted into computer code. Without her work, we might still be instructing computers using pure binary.

And it took her three years just to convince people that she could do it. (Source)

Dennis Ritchie

Born: September 9, 1941 in Bronxville, New York, United States

Died: October 12, 2011 in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, United States

Country: United States

Scientific Field(s): Computer Science

Short Bio

Like most computer scientists, Ritchie started his career with degrees in Physics and Applied Math. While working at Bell, he made some serious contributions to the world of computing by inventing a programming language that could store data in structures (which he cleverly named "data structures"). His language, C, was originally created to help build the UNIX operating system (which is what Mac OSX is built from), but the power of actually being able to store data like this has made the admittedly ugly language incredibly powerful and popular.

Because of his work, we can program in languages that look almost nothing like binary. Which. Is. Awesome. Trust us. (Source)