Leonard M. Adleman
Birth: December 31st, 1945
Major Academic Events: Obtained his Bachelor of Science from Berkeley in 1968, received his PhD in Computer Science from Berkeley in 1976.
Contributions to Computer Science: Leonard M. Adleman helped create RSA encryption, along with Rivest and Shamir. He is also known for his work in number theory and DNA computation. Adleman used DNA to solve an instance of the SAT problem, which is one of the main problems of computer science. He is currently focusing on research in complex analysis.
Source:
viterbi.usc.edu
amturing.acm.org
amacad.org
Tim Berners-Lee
Birth: June 8th, 1955
Major Academic Events: Received a first class degree in Physics from Oxford in 1976.
Contributions to Computer Science: Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet in 1989 while at CERN. He is the director of W3C, or the World Wide Web Consortium, which he founded. He is also a professor in the Computer Science Department at Oxford, where he studied.
Sources:
famousscientists.org
w3.org
internethalloffame.org
Grace Murry Hopper
Birth: December 9th, 1906
Death: January 1st, 1992
Major Academic Events: Graduated with a degree in both Mathematics and Physics from Vassar College in 1928, master's degree in Mathematics from Yale in 1930, PhD in Mathematics from Yale in 1934.
Contributions to Computer Science; Grace Murry Hopper first proposed the idea of writing programs in words, instead of symbols, in 1953, but she was shut down. However, she kept working on her English compiler, and in 1956 she was using FLOW-MATIC, which was the first programming language that uses English commands. Hopper also helped creat COBOL (common business-orientated language) and her work for COBOL is more recognized because she developed compilers and encouraged its adoption.
Source:
yale.edu
womenshistory.org
britannica.com