X-Nico

unusual facts about computer scientist



99 Bottles of Beer

The computer scientist Donald Knuth proved that the song has complexity O(\log N) in his in-joke-article "The Complexity of Songs".

Alexander Schure

Schure was an early champion of computer animation; in 1979 Catmull left to form a computer-graphics group with Lucasfilm and the core technical team- including computer animation pioneers Alvy Ray Smith, David DiFrancesco, Ralph Guggenheim, Jim Blinn, and Jim Clark- came from the NYIT lab.

Algebraic data type

(For more information on nested data types, see the works of Richard Bird, Lambert Meertens and Ross Paterson.

ALGOL 68C

The compiler and language were initially developed by Stephen Bourne and Michael Guy as a dialect of ALGOL 68.

Alloy Analyzer

The Alloy Analyzer, and the associated Alloy language, were developed by a team led by Daniel Jackson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.

Catherine McGeoch

Catherine Cole McGeoch is an American computer scientist specializing in empirical algorithmics and heuristics for NP-hard problems.

Charles Forgy

Dr Charles L. Forgy (born December 12, 1949 in Texas) is a computer scientist, known for developing the Rete algorithm used in his OPS5 and other production system languages used to build expert systems.

CiteSeer

CiteSeer was created by researchers Lee Giles, Kurt Bollacker and Steve Lawrence in 1997 while they were at the NEC Research Institute (now NEC Labs), Princeton, New Jersey, USA.

Claude Crépeau

In 1993, together with Charles H. Bennett, Gilles Brassard, Richard Jozsa, Asher Peres, and William Wootters, Prof. Crépeau invented quantum teleportation.

Daniel Sleator

Sleator has hosted the progressive talk show Left Out on WRCT-FM with fellow host and School of Computer Science faculty member Bob Harper.

David E. Goldberg

David Edward Goldberg (born 1953) is an American computer scientist, civil engineer, and professor at the department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering (IESE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is most noted for his seminal works in the field of genetic algorithms.

Edward D. Lazowska

Lazowska has mentored a number of students, including Hank Levy (University of Washington), Yi-Bing Lin (National Chiao Tung University), Ed Felten (Princeton University), and Christophe Bisciglia (successively Google, Cloudera, and WibiData).

Erich Gamma

Erich Gamma (born 1961 in Zürich) is Swiss computer scientist and co-author of the influential software engineering textbook, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

Gerard Salton Award

2000 - Stephen E. Robertson, City University London : "On theoretical argument in information retrieval."
For ... "Thirty years of significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval. Of special importance are the theoretical and empirical contributions to the development, refinement, and evaluation of probabilistic models of information retrieval."

Harald Ganzinger

Harald Ganzinger (October 31, 1950, Werneck – June 3, 2004, Saarbrücken) was a German computer scientist that together with Leo Bachmair developed the superposition calculus, which is (as of 2007) used in most of the state-of-the-art automated theorem provers for first-order logic.

Jacques Vallée

Jacques Fabrice Vallée (born September 24, 1939 in Pontoise, Val-d'Oise, France) is a venture capitalist, computer scientist, author, ufologist and former astronomer currently residing in San Francisco, California.

Jean-Marie Hullot

Jean-Marie Hullot (born February 16, 1954) is a French computer scientist and programmer who authored important programs for the original Macintosh, NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X platforms.

Jennifer Seberry

Jennifer Roma Seberry is an Australian cryptographer, mathematician, and computer scientist, currently a professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia.

John Makepeace Bennett

Emeritus Professor John Makepeace Bennett AO FTSE (31 July 1921 – 9 December 2010) was an early Australian computer scientist.

Joseph Weizenbaum

Joseph Weizenbaum (8 January 1923 – 5 March 2008) was a German and American computer scientist and a professor emeritus at MIT.

Jürg Gutknecht

Jürg Gutknecht (* January, 3rd, 1949 in Bülach) is a Swiss Computer Scientist.

Lawrence M. Breed

Breed was the 1973 recipient (with Dick Lathwell and Roger Moore) of the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery "for their work in the design and implementation of APL\360, setting new standards in simplicity, efficiency, reliability and response time for interactive systems.

Los Alamos chess

This program was written in Los Alamos laboratory by Paul Stein and Mark Wells for the MANIAC I computer in 1956.

Luc Devroye

Luc P. Devroye is a Belgian computer scientist/mathematician and a James McGill Professor in the School of Computer Science of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Neats vs. scruffies

The distinction was originally made by Roger Schank in the mid-1970s to characterize the difference between his work on natural language processing (which represented commonsense knowledge in the form of large amorphous semantic networks) from the work of John McCarthy, Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, Robert Kowalski and others whose work was based on logic and formal extensions of logic.

Nicola Guarino

Nicola Guarino (born Messina, 1954) is an Italian computer scientist and researcher in the area of Formal Ontology for Information Systems, and the head of the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA), part of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in Trento.

Norbert Pohlmann

Norbert Pohlmann (born 20 March 1960 in Ratingen/Germany) is a computer scientist and a professor at the Westphalia University of Applied Sciences Gelsenkirchen.

OpenQwaq

The main developers of this family of technologies include Alan Kay, David Smith, Andreas Raab and David Reed, whose 1978 doctoral thesis on naming and synchronizations in a decentralized computer system introduced many of the main concepts.

Python Robotics

The principal investigators on the NSF grant were Douglas Blank of Bryn Mawr College, Kurt Konolige of SRI International, Deepak Kumar (computer scientist) of Bryn Mawr College, Lisa Meeden of Swarthmore College, and Holly Yanco of University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Quantum dot cellular automaton

A different wire-crossing technique, which makes fabrication of QCA devices more practical, was presented by Christopher Graunke, David Wheeler, Douglas Tougaw, and Jeffrey D. Will, in their paper “Implementation of a crossbar network using quantum-dot cellular automata”.

Quicksort

Practical efficiency and smaller variance in performance were demonstrated against optimised quicksorts (of Sedgewick and Bentley-McIlroy).

Richard Altwasser

Altwasser left Sinclair at the beginning of May 1982 to establish his own company, along with Steve Vickers, author of the Spectrum's ROM firmware and manual.

Richard H. Lathwell

Richard Henry Lathwell was the 1973 recipient (with Larry Breed and Roger Moore) of the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.

Sargur Srihari

N. Srihari (Sargur Narasimhamurthy Srihari) is an American Computer scientist and educator who has made contributions to the field of pattern recognition.

Session Initiation Protocol

Originally designed by Henning Schulzrinne and Mark Handley in 1996, SIP has been developed and standardized in RFC 3261 under the auspices of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Seymour Ginsburg

Those who benefitted from Ginsburg's mentorship, who were not also his PhD students, included: Jonathan Goldstine, Sheila Greibach, Michael Harrison, Richard Hull, and Jeff Ullman.

SlashNET

SlashNET has been host to numerous IRC forums with famous people in the tech industry, including Ken Coar, Marcel Gagne, Richard Stallman, Jamie Zawinski, Matt Dillon of DragonflyBSD, Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda and Jeff 'Hemos' Bates of Slashdot, Rusty Foster and Dylan 'Inoshiro' Griffiths of kuro5hin, and the distributed.net crew.

Square root biased sampling

Square root biased sampling is a sampling method proposed by William H. Press, a computer scientist and computational biologist, for use in airport screenings.

The longest suicide note in history

It has subsequently been used by Peter Gutmann in his paper "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection" to describe the Digital Rights Management schemes in the Windows Vista operating system.

User interface management systems

Important research in this field has been done by Brad Myers, Dan Olsen, Scott Hudson and James D. Foley.

Wesley A. Clark

Wesley Allison Clark (born 1927) is a computer scientist and one of the main participants, along with Charles Molnar, in the creation of the LINC laboratory computer, which was the first mini-computer and shares with a number of other computers (such as the PDP-1) the claim to be the inspiration for the personal computer.

ZWEI

ZWEI (ZWEI Was EINE, Initially, also German: two) was an early (~1980s) Emacs-like text editor written by Daniel Weinreb and Mike McMahon for the Lisp machine.


see also

Abdulrab

Habib Abdulrab Sarori (born 1956), Yemeni computer scientist and writer

Adleman

Leonard Adleman (born 1945), American theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science and molecular biology

Andree

Richard V. Andree (1919–1987), American mathematician and computer scientist.

Berners-Lee

Conway Berners-Lee (born 1921), British mathematician and computer scientist, father of Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee (born 1955), British engineer and computer scientist, known for his creation of the World Wide Web

Beyond the Stars

This science fiction drama centers on Eric, teenage son of a computer scientist who worked for the Apollo program which sent the first humans to the moon.

Brad Silverberg

Brad Silverberg is an American computer scientist and businessman, most noted for his work at Microsoft in 1990–1999 as Senior VP and product manager for MS-DOS, Windows, Internet Explorer, and Office.

Buridan's ass

The situation of Buridan's ass was given a mathematical basis in a 1984 paper by American computer scientist Leslie Lamport, in which Lamport presents an argument that, given certain assumptions about continuity in a simple mathematical model of the Buridan's ass problem, there will always be some starting conditions under which the ass will starve to death, no matter what strategy it takes.

Canny

John Canny, American computer scientist, namesake of the Canny edge detector

Caryn

Caryn Navy, blind American mathematician and computer scientist

Commodities Corporation

Ed Seykota, a computer scientist, technical trader and pioneer in System Trading

Craig Nevill-Manning

Craig Nevill-Manning is a New Zealand computer scientist who founded Google's first remote engineering center, located in midtown Manhattan, where he is an Engineering Director.

David Dobkin

David P. Dobkin (born 1948), computer scientist and the Dean of the Faculty at Princeton University

David McAllester

David A. McAllester, computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher

Dittman

Kevin C. Dittman (born 1960), American computer scientist, IT consultant and Professor

Don Ritter

His professors at MIT and Harvard included artist Otto Piene, computer scientist Marvin Minsky, designer Muriel Cooper, composer Tod Machover, and film theorist Vlada Petric.

Fred Glover

Fred W. Glover, computer scientist, inventor of tabu search and of the term "meta-heuristic"

Hans Van Vliet

Hans van Vliet (born 1949), Dutch computer scientist and Professor of Software Engineering at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Jakopin

Primož Jakopin (born 1949), Slovene computer scientist and linguist, son of Franc and Gitica

James Thornton

James E. Thornton, American computer scientist, winner of the 1994 Eckert–Mauchly Award

Jean-Paul Delahaye

Jean-Paul Delahaye (born June 29, 1952 in Saint-Mandé Seine) is a French computer scientist and mathematician.

Jim Mitchell

James G. Mitchell, commonly known as Jim Mitchell, (born 1943), Canadian computer scientist

John Sorenson

Jon Sorenson (born 1964), American academic and computer scientist at Butler University

Kaashoek

Frans Kaashoek (born 1965), Dutch mathematician and computer scientist

Logicomix

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth is a graphic novel about the foundational quest in mathematics, written by Apostolos Doxiadis, author of Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture, and theoretical computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou of the University of California, Berkeley.

Mailloux

Barry J. Mailloux (19??-1982), Canadian computer scientist, editor and professor

Mark O'Neill

Mark A. O'Neill (born 1959), British entomologist and computer scientist

Meinolf Sellmann

Meinolf Sellmann, born in Holzminden, Germany, computer scientist, best known for algorithmic research in combinatorial optimization, artificial intelligence, and the hybridization thereof.

Michael H. Albert

Michael Henry Albert (born September 20, 1962) is a mathematician and computer scientist, originally from Canada, and currently a professor and the head of the computer science department at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

Michael J. Kurtz

Michael J Kurtz is an astrophysicist at Harvard University, He has held the title of Astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics since 1983, and the addition post of Computer Scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory since 1984.

Michael Kudlick

Michael Douglas Kudlick (December 8, 1934 - February 16, 2008) was a computer scientist and professor of computer science, most known for developing the file transfer and mail protocols for ARPANET while working for the Augmentation Research Center at SRI International, and later as a noted professor and academic administrator at the University of San Francisco.

Michael Schroeder

Michael Schroeder is a computer scientist perhaps best known as the co-inventor of the Needham–Schroeder protocol.

Novxanı

Lotfi Asker Zadeh — American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, founder of the theory of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic.

Open Systems Interconnection

The OSI protocol suite that was specified as part of the project was considered by many, such as computer scientist Andrew S. Tanenbaum, to be too complicated and inefficient, and to a large extent unimplementable.

Overmars

Mark Overmars, Dutch computer scientist and the creator of Game Maker

Peter Hart

Peter E. Hart, computer scientist and pioneer in artificial intelligence

Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies

The Institute's visiting professors to date have been the intellectual historian Arif Dirlik (in 2005), the Nobel prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffman (in 2008), and French neurophysiologist Alain Berthoz (in 2009), computer scientist Barbara Grosz (in 2010), and cognitive neuroscientist, Stanislas Dehaene (2011), and microbiologist, Philippe Sansonetti (2011).

Soltis

Frank Soltis (born 1940), an American computer scientist, is IBM's Chief Scientist for the System i computers.

Stochastic forensics

Stochastic forensics was invented in 2010 by computer scientist Jonathan Grier to detect and investigate insider data theft.

Stuart Russell

Stuart J. Russell (born 1962), computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence

Tim Lee

Tim Berners-Lee (born 1955), British engineer and computer scientist

University Academy Birkenhead

David John Pearson, theoretical physicist and computer scientist, architect of the CADES software engineering system

Van Thienen

Jan Vanthienen (born 1954), Belgian business theorist and computer scientist

Vinge

Vernor Vinge (born 1944), a retired San Diego State University Professor of Mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author

Web for Schools

The initial inspiration came from Robert Cailliau, a Belgian computer scientist who developed together with Tim Berners-Lee the World Wide Web.

Web science

An earlier definition was given by American computer scientist Ben Shneiderman: "Web Science" is a term that refers to processing the information available on the web in similar terms to those applied to natural environment.

Yao's Millionaires' Problem

Yao's Millionaires' problem is a secure multiparty communication problem which was introduced by Andrew Yao, a prominent computer scientist and computational theorist.