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James Gosling earned the nickname Dr. Java after he revolutionized the world of computer programming with his Java programming language. The Carnegie Mellon alumnus has had a 26-year stint with Sun Microsystems. The computer nerd has a picture of the first 1000 digits of √2 framed in his office.
Princeton alumnus Brian Kernighan had a 30-year stint at the Bell Laboratories before returning to his alma mater as a professor. The Canadian computer scientist has played a major role in the development of Unix and has also co-authored the first book on the C programming language.
Best known as the co-designer of the Go programming language, computer programmer Rob Pike has had an illustrious stint with the Bell Labs and now works with Google. He was also part of the Unix development team and has co-written books such as The Practice of Programming.
A.M. Turing Award-winning American-Canadian computer scientist Stephen Cook is known for his contribution to the development of the computational complexity theory and laid down the Cook–Levin theorem. The Harvard alumnus has also taught at institutes such as the University of Toronto. He is also an avid sailor and violinist.
Rasmus Lerdorf was the brain behind the PHP scripting language, which flourished from his personal home page and became an open-source language used worldwide. Born in Greenland, he later moved to Denmark, before settling in Canada, and has had a successful stint with companies such as Yahoo! and Etsy.
Alfred Aho is a Canadian computer scientist. He is best known for his work on compilers, programming languages, and related algorithms. He is the author of several popular textbooks on the art and science of computer programming. Along with his long-time collaborator Jeffrey Ullman, he was awarded the 2020 Turing Award, one of the most prestigious awards in computer science.
An adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, Hans Peter Moravec is mostly known for his work on artificial intelligence. He firmly believed that the robots would overtake humans in near future. He has published multiple works including Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind on the subject. .
Born to a South African mother and a Dutch father in Pretoria, Theo de Raadt later moved to Canada with his family. The software engineer founded the OpenBSD and OpenSSH operating system networks and also contributed to NetBSD. He has also formed the Internet Exchange YYCIX in Calgary.
A.M. Turing Award-winning Canadian computer scientist William Kahan was the man behind the IEEE 754-1985 specification for floating-point calculation, which makes sure computations on different computers produce identical results. He also laid down the Kahan summation algorithm. The University of California, Berkeley professor is also an ACM Fellow.
