John Atanasoff and his graduate student Clifford Berry designed the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, or ABC, between 1937 and 1942. This was the first electronic digital computer to be conceptualized for solving systems of simultaneous linear algebraic equations. It used binary digits in its functioning and employed vacuum tubes for the same. Although it was never fully operational, the ABC's design laid the foundation for future computers, influencing later developments in computing by pioneers like Alan Turing and John von Neumann.
Guido van Rossum, a Dutch computer scientist with a strong background in mathematics, won a bronze medal in the 1974 International Mathematical Olympiad. Later, he earned a master's degree in mathematics and went on to create, in the late 1980s, the Python programming language. Python was developed as a hobby project with the aim of making programming simpler and more readable, addressing limitations in other languages at the time. Its clean syntax and effiecency quickly made it popular in fields ranging from web development to data science.
This has made van Rossum successful in collaborating with big technological companies like Google and Microsoft by helping the integration of this language into their platforms. Even though he has contributed a lot to computer science, all of van Rossum's works are not related to the ABC. He is known to develop Python, which became one of the most used programming languages in the world.
Vinton G. Cerf was born on June 23, 1943, and is a renowned computer scientist considered one of the co-designers of the TCP/IP protocols forming the backbone of the internet. He served as the first president of the Internet Society from 1992 to 1995 and is currently working as Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. He has also contributed to the efforts of NASA in extending internet technology for communication with spacecraft. He earned his B.S. from Stanford University and both his M.S. and Ph.D. from UCLA. Among many others, Cerf has received the U.S. National Medal of Technology, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, and the Tunisian National Medal of Science.