Famous Coders
There have been some very interesting coders and mathematicians down through history and many are very alive and well today. Here are some of them.
Charles Babbage was a mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer. Babbage is credited with inventing the first computer named the difference engine which was a mechanical device. Babbage is considered the 'father of the computer'.
Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer. Ada was a good friend of Charles Babbage who had invented a mechanical computing machine. Ada was way ahead of her time as she lived in England in the first part of the 1800s. Her ability to solve complex mathematical problems and interest in mechanical machines led her to publish very forward looking documents on how computers would work. She is recognised as being the first person to write an algorithm which is a step by step of operations to be carried out by a machine to complete a task.
Alan Turning was a British mathematician and is considered by many as the 'father of Computer Science'. He is now famously know for his work decrypting coded messages created using the Enigma machine which was invented by Germans and used during the second world war to hide directions being issued to troops. Winston Churchill who was Prime Minister of England during the war estimated that Alan's work in breaking the codes using the Bombe machine which he invented, shortened the way by 2 to 4 years and saved numerous lives. Alan Turing was very interested in Artificial Intelligence and devised a test now know as the Turing test which can be used to check if a computer has reached the same intelligence as a human being.
Grace Hopper was an american computer scientist and navy admiral. Grace was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark 1 in 1944. The Mark 1 was used to calculate missile trajectories for the US Navy. In fact women were the first programmers as it was felt that hardware was for guys and software was more suited to girls. Grace's work led to the development of the Cobol programming language which was one of the first high level languages.
Tim Berners-Lee is an english computer scientist who is best known as the inventor of the world wide web. The Internet had been invented by Universities in the US using Military funding in the late 1960s and early 1970s but there was no web. In fact, it took another 15 years to invent the web and still another 5 years after that to make it a reality as some people thought it wouldn't catch on. The first web page was very simple but used the same HTML we use today.
Brendan Eich is the american mathematician and computer scientist who created the JavaScript programming language while working at Netscape. The first version was created in 10 days. Brendan went on to found the Mozilla project which produced the Firefox browser.