Famous British Computer Scientists

Regarded as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, Alan Turing was a distinguished mathematician and logician. During WWII, he successfully broke the challenging German Enigma machine codes thereby reducing the duration of war by a couple of years. The scientist, who was convicted for being gay, has been an inspiration for numerous films, plays and novels.

Widely known as ten inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee made the first communication between an HTTP client and server through the internet in 1989. He is associated with various organizations, such as the W3C and the World Wide Web Foundation, and has received the knighthood, too.

Tony Hoare is a British computer scientist who is credited with developing the sorting algorithm quicksort. He is also credited with developing Hoare logic, a formal system for verifying program correctness. Over the years, Tony Hoare has received several prestigious awards for his contribution to computer science.

Stephen Wolfram is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman, best known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and theoretical physics. He is a  fellow of the American Mathematical Society. As a businessman, he is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, a software company. 

A consumer electronics pioneer, entrepreneur Clive Sinclair began his business venture selling radio and amplifier kits. He went on to launch the word’s first pocket calculator and later also worked on products such as digital watches and pocket TV. He is a fan of poker and is a Mensa member.

A professor at the Coventry and Reading universities, engineer Kevin Warwicke specializes in artificial intelligence, robotics, and biomedical engineering. One of his most interesting research interests is the possibility of creating cyborgs, which has earned him the nickname Captain Cyborg. He has been awarded honorary doctorates from several universities.

Born to a bricklayer in London’s East End, Tommy Flowers completed his studies in electrical engineering attending night classes while working as an apprentice during the day. He developed Max Newman’s model of a machine that had the potential to decipher German codes and turned it into his Colossus computer.

David J. C. MacKay was a British mathematician, physicist, and academic. He studied at the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology. As an academic, he served as the Regius Professor of Engineering in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). 

Known as Yak on all online forums, video-game designer and programmer Jeff Minter is also the founder of Llamasoft. His games often include characters such as llamas and camels and a healthy dose of psychedelics. He has also appeared in the movie Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

British computer scientist Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes is noted for constructing the early British computer Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) and for inventing microprogramming. He designed and helped build the EDSAC, one of the earliest stored program computers which became a full-scale operational computer. The concept of microprogramming developed by him also greatly simplified the development of CPU.