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.

After gaining a degree in psychology, Geoffrey Hinton earned a PhD in artificial intelligence. The Google VP is a Turing Award-winning computer scientist and also teaches at the University of Toronto. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he has revolutionized neural network research and has co-written about 200 papers.

The brain behind the Acorn Micro-Computer, Sophie Wilson also contributed to the BBC Micro and ARM architecture. During her first summer vacation at Cambridge, she designed an automated cow-feeder. Born Roger Wilson, she went through a sex-change surgery in 1994. She is also associated with local theater groups.

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.

Mark Shuttleworth is a South African-British entrepreneur. He is credited with founding Canonical, the company that developed the popular Linux-based Ubuntu operating system. Mark Shuttleworth became the first African from an independent country and the first South African to travel to space; he traveled as a space tourist in 2002.

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. 

Welsh venture capitalist and former journalist Michael Moritz was earlier associated with Time as a writer. Now a partner at Sequoia Capital, he has invested in and been part of the boards of organizations such as Google, PayPal, and Yahoo. He penned The Little Kingdom, the first-known history of Apple.

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.

Software engineer Martin Fowler, who works as a chief scientist at ThoughtWorks, has also penned numerous books on software development, such as Refactoring and The Adventures of Dai Dreaming. He was one of the signatories of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and runs a bliki.

Turing Award-winning computer scientist Edgar F. Codd is best remembered for his relational data model, which contributed to the development of the relational database used in storing and retrieving computer data. An Oxford graduate, he had also worked for the army during World War II.

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.

Born Vera Buchthal, Steve Shirley moved from Germany to Britain as a child refugee during the Nazi regime. Later, going by the name Stephanie Brook, she began learning coding. Battling a male-dominated workplace environment, she changed her name to Steve. The celebrated scientist now runs a charitable foundation.

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.

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). 

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.

Born in Greece, Chrisanthi Avgerou later pursued her studies and research work in information systems in England. The LSE alumna is now a professor at the same institute. She is known for her research on the role of ICT in bringing about organizational change and socio-economic development.