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Blaise Pascal
- A French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, writer, and Catholic theologian.
- Pascal invented the first digital calculator to help his father with his work collecting taxes. He worked on it for three years between
1642 and 1645. The device, called the Pascaline, resembled a mechanical calculator of the 1940s.
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Charles Babbage
- A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer
- Babbage's Difference Engine Number 1 was the first device ever devised that could calculate and print mathematical tables.
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Ada Lovelace
- English mathematician and writer
- Ada Lovelace discovered that a computer could follow a sequence of instructions, making the computer programing
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Grace Hopper
- An American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral.
- Was one of the first computer programmers to work on the Harvard Mark I. She was also a United States Navy rear admiral, helped develop COBOL -- one of the first high-level programming languages -- and invented the first compiler, a program that translates programming code to machine language.
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Turing
- The world's first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, in 1941.