Computer Science

🇬🇧Alan Turing

Science

1912–1954

"AlanTuring.net - Turing Archive for the History of Computing"

🇺🇸Newton Lee

Literature

"One of the root causes of miscommunication is that people do not always mean what they say or do."

🇩🇰Bjarne Stroustrup

Science

b. 1950

"A program that has not been tested does not work."

🇺🇸Marvin Minsky

Mathematics

1927–2016

"Get the mind into the state that solved the old problem; then it might handle the new problem in the "same way."

🇩🇪Joscha Bach

Philosophy

b. 1973

"Long ago, physics and other natural sciences... had become computational."

🇬🇧Tim Berners-Lee

Technology

b. 1955

"Now, if someone tries to monopolize the Web, for example pushes proprietary variations on network protocols, then that would make me unhappy."

🇺🇸John Henry Holland

Science

1929–2015

"Evolution continually innovates, but at each level it conserves the elements that are recombined to yield the innovations."

"Pestel was a very forceful person and quickly saw the power of system dynamics."

🇺🇸Donald Knuth

Science

b. 1938

"The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues."

🇺🇸Gary Kildall

Science

1942–1994

"You need to study other people's work. Their approaches to problem solving and the tools they use give you a fresh way to look at your own work."

🇺🇸Nicholas Negroponte

Literature

b. 1943

"Think about it. Turning pages. How ridiculous that is. It's just unbelievably dumb. … building peripherals for iTunes … We can't turn these kids into couch potatoes."

🇺🇸Dennis Ritchie

Science

1941–2011

"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."

🇺🇸J. C. R. Licklider

Science

1915–1990

"transmit information without transporting material"

🇨🇳Robin Li

Technology

b. 1968

"I think it's much severe than what you have experienced in the past year or two for the general economic situation."

"19: A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing."

🇺🇸Bruce Schneier

Literature

b. 1963

"Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four."

🇺🇸Hal Abelson

Technology

b. 1947

"Tcl for Web Nerds - short programming web tutorial authored in part by Abelson"

🇺🇸Rudy Rucker

Science

b. 1946

"I had formed a vague idea that the sex sphere was a hypersphere extending into the fourth dimension. Which meant that if the sphere's giant cunt swallowed me I could end up somewhere very . . . different."

🇫🇷Xavier Leroy

Science

b. 1968

"You see, the Caml garbage collector is like a god from ancient mythology: mighty, but very irritable. If you mess with it, it'll make you suffer in surprising ways."

"To distinguish the meaningful graphs that represent real or possible situations in the external world, certain graphs are declared to be canonical."

🇺🇸Alan Kay

Science

b. 1940

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

🇺🇸Judea Pearl

Science

b. 1936

"A quantity Q is identifiable, given a set of assumptions A, iffor any two models M1 and M2 that satisfy A, we have"

🇺🇸John Tukey

Mathematics

1915–2000

"Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise."

🇿🇦Phiwa Nkambule

Technology

b. 1992

"Growing up, I believed that people of African origin were born engineers and inventors. That belief boosted my confidence, which has become my greatest strength."

Charles Babbage

Mathematics

1791–1871

"Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all."

🇺🇸Grace Hopper

Mathematics

1906–1992

"Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, "We've always done it this way." I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise."

"If there is ever a science of programming language design, it will probably consist largely of matching languages to the design methods they support."

🇺🇸Vernor Vinge

Literature

1944–2024

"Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season."

🇺🇸Terry Winograd

Philosophy

b. 1946

"The techniques of artificial intelligence are to the mind what bureaucracy is to human social interaction."

🇺🇸George Forsythe

Science

1917–1972

"To a modern mathematician, design seems to be a second-rate intellectual activity."

🇺🇸Howard H. Aiken

Science

1900–1973

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."

🇺🇸Stephen Wolfram

Science

b. 1959

"Wolfram, Stephen, A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media, Inc., May 14, 2002."

🇺🇸Fred Brooks

Science

1931–2022

"Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious."

"While the machines have changed enormously, the business of software development has been rather static."

🇺🇸Allen Newell

Science

1927–1992

"The Physical Symbol System Hypothesis. A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action."

🇬🇧Maurice Wilkes

Mathematics

1913–2010

"M. V. Wilkes Bibliography at University of Cambridge website"

🇺🇸Daniel J. Bernstein

Mathematics

b. 1971

"So it's tempting to incorporate a smaller resolver library into qmail. I'd no longer be able to blame the BIND authors and vendors for the fact that attackers can easily use DNS to steal mail."

"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents."