I’ll be focusing on Donald Knuth in this biography, if for no other reason than finding him very charming on a podcast once (Fridman 2019). That’s not to imply his contributions aren’t worthy enough to warrant choosing him however, as Knuth is widely known for writing one of the most comprehensive and seminal compendiums in computer science, The Art of Computer Programming, among other things.
Knuth is a retired American professor, currently 84 years old, a church organist and father, with a bachelors, masters and doctorate in mathematics (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009). In spite of this, his most notable contributions, culminating in receiving the illustrious Turing Award (Walden 2019), have been in computer science. He manged to cross this admittedly small gap from mathematics to computer science after being introduced to the IBM 650 – a really early consumer computer – while studying for his bachelor's degree, deciding that he could write the assembly and compiler code better than IBM.
Not only did he manage it, but also went on to spend his summers writing compilers for major companies, gaining such a reputation that he was commissioned to write a book about them (Knuth 1997); one book quickly became several. In these books, currently five with plans for more, Knuth perspicaciously attempts to present all that there is to know about programming and algorithms, covering theory, applicability and problem solving. It’s this that received the previously mentioned Turing Award, as the content was and still is considered to be widely brilliant and informative. So technical are its contents that Bill Gates has since claimed you should “send [him] a resume” if you’re able to understand it (Weinberger 2017), and Knuth described it as “the most important project of [his] life” (Knuth 1999).
To accompany these books, he created the TeX computational typesetting system, which presents mathematical and computational formulae in a uniform and sophisticated fashion that simply didn’t exist at the time he created it (Schechter 2005). Meaning, aspiring computer scientists and mathematicians now had the ability to present much higher-quality written work. Furthermore, due to Knuth’s personal disdain for patents (Knuth and Wayback Machine 2015), it was created open-source allowing people to access and develop on it freely, leading to the now popular LaTeX (an updated version of TeX), that’s still dominant today, 44 years later.
By making high-quality written work more accessible, and creating a detailed, curriculum-guiding explanation of its most complex concepts, Knuth has pushed computer science forwards and cemented himself a place in its history.