Raj Reddy
Death: N/A
Major Academic Events: The first member of his family to attend college, Raj Reddy earned a bachelor in civil engineering from Guindy College of Engineering and a master's in technology from the University of South Wales. After working at IBM Australia, he moved to the US to earn a master and doctorate in computer science from Stanford.
Contributions to Computer Science: Reddy extensively studied AI, eventually developing voice recognition alongside his colleagues. The program was under the name “DARPA”. DARPA also gained voice commands and was the guidelines to modern commercial products that use voice recognition products. During his time at Carnegie Hall, he founded the Robotics Institute. Reddy was a player in bridging the digital divide via his product called PCtvt.
Ivan Sutherland
Death: N/A
Major Academic Events: Ivan Sutherland earned an electrical engineering degree up to a doctorate, first a bachelor from Carnegie Mellon, then a master’s from Caltech, and finally, a doctorate from MIT. At MIT he also got a Ph.D. in mathematics.
Contributions to Computer Science: For his doctoral dissertion (Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System), Sutherland used a TX-2 and its light pen to be able to draw simple designs on an interface, manipulate them, and then print/store the drawing. This was unheard of, because computers then could only take input and produce an output with no user interface.
Alan Turing
Death: June 7, 1954
Major Academic Events: In 1931, Alan headed to Cambridge to pursue mathematics. In 1935, he was elected to fellowship for a paper titled, “On the Gaussian Error Function”. In 1938, Turing went on to earn a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University.
Contributions to Computer Science: Turing’s paper, “On Computer Numbers” helped to develop the growing science of computer programming and features a method known as the Turing Method. This also was linked to him creating the (theoretical) Turing machine, which could compute most anything, including pi, following a set of rules. The machine itself would write symbols on paper (tape) or delete them.