For this assignment you will write a short (700+ word) paper about an influential person in the
history of computer science or information technology. Please read the pdf.
CS110 - Influential People in Computer Science
Assignment
For this assignment you will write a short (700+ word) paper about an influential person in the
history of computer science or information technology. You may choose a person from the list
below, or if there is someone not on the list that you would like to write about, contact your
professor for approval. Note that if you choose a person not on the list, that person should
generally have have done significant work to the computer science/information technology
before 1975. In other words, people such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and so
forth will not be approved. However, there may be some names on the list that have influenced
the field more recently.
Your paper will be graded according to the associated rubric posted on Blackboard. Use that
rubric to ensure that you have met all the requirements of the paper. In general, your paper will
be approximately four paragraphs and should include:
● A paragraph giving biographical information about the person you choose. This will
include:
○ Dates of birth and death (if known. If not known, why not?)
○ Location(s) where person grew up and/or lived
○ Influences on childhood/early adulthood
○ Any interesting aspects about the person not necessarily related to computer
science or his/her influence on the field (such as fighting in the French Revolution
or beekeeping or writing romance novels, etc.)
● A paragraph describing the contribution that your person made to the field of computer
science
○ Was it a mechanical machine? A mathematical formula? An electronic device?
An idea that drove society to use a computing device?
○ How did the person come up with the idea?
○ Did the person know that their idea would be used in the way that made it
influential to computer science?
● A paragraph describing how the contribution affected or influenced the progress of
computer science
○ Or, if it was a dead-end device or idea, what about it made it so, yet still have an
influence?
● A concluding paragraph summarizing the person and idea which will include:
○ Your thoughts about why the person, and his/her idea or device was influential
○ Your thoughts about how the world of computer science or information
technology would be different if not for your person.
In addition to your paper, you must pick at least two other people from the list below and write
a few sentences regarding why they are found on the list. Examples (which you may NOT use,
since they are not on the list) might be:
● Steve Jobs: Co-founded (with Steve Wozniak) Apple, Inc. which made and sold personal
computers to the mass market. Apple Computer became one of the largest and
influential computer and electronics company in the world.
● Bill Gates: An American entrepreneur and philanthropist. He co-founded Microsoft (with
Paul Allen) which became the world’s largest PC software company. Microsoft is
dominant in the PC operating system market.
Note that the word count for these two other people is above and beyond the 700 word
minimum for the main person you have chosen.
Finally, ensure that your paper includes proper references and citations of all your sources. The
specific format for citations is up to you (MLA, Chicago, APA, etc.) but all references and
quotations must be cited. As part of your submission, your paper will be run through
Blackboard’s SafeAssign. An Honor Code violation may possibly be submitted if it is found that
there is an egregious disregard of properly referencing sources, or if large portions of your
paper was copied from other sources.
The list of famous/influential people* in computer science (in no particular order):
● Gottlob Frege
● Kurt Gödel
● Alan Turing
● Ada Lovelace
● Richard Hamming
● Blaise Pascal
● John von Neumann
● Konrad Zuse
● Grace Hopper
● Charles Babbage
● Donald Knuth
● Al-Jazari
● Dennis Ritchie
● Pāṇini
● Edsger Dijkstra
● Barbara Liskov
● Tim Berners-Lee
● David A. Huffman
● Niklaus Wirth
● Claude Shannon
● Herman Hollerith
● Leonid Levin
● Gordon Moore
● George Boole
● Joseph Marie
Jacquard
● Seymour Cray
● Robert Andre
Tarjan
● Guy Steele
● Ken Thompson
● Maurice Wilkes
● Herman Hollerith
● Bertrand Russell
● Emil L. Post
● John Mauchly
● Larry Page
● Bill Joy
● Clarence Ellis
● Richard Stallman
● Linus Torvalds
● Hedy Lamarr
● John McCarthy
● Marvin Minsky
● John Tukey
● Norbert Wiener
● Herman Goldstine
● Margaret Hamilton
● Bjarne Stroustrup
● Gottfried Leibniz
● Mark Dean
● Melba Roy Mouton
- Note that women and/or people of color are under represented on the list. We are sure that
there are other minorities who have made contributions to CS similar to what those on the list
above have made. Unfortunately, due to the societal biases in the past, they have mostly been
marginalized or forgotten. That is something that we would like to correct. If you can find more
names that can be added to the list, we would certainly consider adding them. However, please
understand that we are looking for people who made specific contributions to Computer
Science as a discipline, not merely people who were/are respected in the field and also happen
to be minorities. For example, Katherine Johnson (from the book and movie Hidden Figures)
was integral in the NASA Mercury project (and later NASA projects) and one of the first
African-American NASA scientists, but she is not on the list because her work did not generally
contribute to the advancement of the Computer Science field.