The Pioneers

The people who built computing — from Hilbert's question to agent swarms

Illustration companion to From Turing to LLMs and Beyond

The Idea

1930s
Alan Turing
1912 – 1954
Defined computation itself
λ
Alonzo Church
1903 – 1995
Lambda calculus — computation through functions
?
Kurt Gödel
1906 – 1978
Proved mathematics has limits
David Hilbert
1862 – 1943
Posed the question that started it all

Building the Machines

1940s – 1950s
John von Neumann
1903 – 1957
The architecture inside every computer
Konrad Zuse
1910 – 1995
Built the first programmable computer
Tommy Flowers
1905 – 1998
Built Colossus to crack Nazi codes
The ENIAC Six
Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Fran Bilas, Ruth Lichterman
The original programmers

Teaching Machines

1950s – 1960s
Grace Hopper
1906 – 1992
Invented the compiler
F77
John Backus
1924 – 2007
Created FORTRAN, the first high-level language
( )
John McCarthy
1927 – 2011
Named AI, created LISP
Mary Kenneth Keller
1913 – 1985
First woman to earn a CS PhD in the US

The Software Revolution

1970s – 1980s
| Ken | Dennis
Ken Thompson & Dennis Ritchie
Ken b. 1943  |  Dennis 1941 – 2011
Co-created Unix; Dennis created C
GNU
Richard Stallman
b. 1953
Free software — free as in freedom

The Connected World

1990s – 2000s
Tim Berners-Lee
b. 1955
Invented the World Wide Web
Linus Torvalds
b. 1969
Created Linux and Git

Machines That Learn

2000s – 2020s
Hinton LeCun Bengio
Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun & Yoshua Bengio
Hinton b. 1947  |  LeCun b. 1960  |  Bengio b. 1964
The three godfathers of deep learning
Fei-Fei Li
b. 1976
ImageNet — the dataset that changed everything

The Transformer Age

2017 +
"Attention Is All You Need"
Ashish Vaswani et al.
Google Brain, 2017
"Attention Is All You Need" — the Transformer architecture