People

Haskell Books Curry (1900-1982) was an American mathematician known for developing combinatory logic. Three programming languages are named after him (Haskell, Brooks, and Curry), in addition to currying, a technique of applying arguments through a chain of function calls.

def add(a):
    return lambda b: a + b

add(2)(2)

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930-2002) was a Dutch computer science pioneer. Dijkstra made fundamental contributions to a diverse set of areas in the field (including compilers, distributed computing, concurrent programming, and program design). He also had significant contributions to algorithms (e.g. Dijkstra's algorithm). Dijkstra's 1968 letter Go To Statement Considered Harmful highlighted dangers of the goto statement. He advocated (and coined the term) structured programming.

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability."

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."

"The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go."

John McCarthy (1927-2011) was a American computer scientist. McCarthy is considered the father of artificial intelligence (a term he coined). He invented the programming language Lisp in 1958. The language design was described in Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I (ACM, 1960). McCarthy also developed the concept of time-sharing computing resources. John McCarthy was a professor at Stanford University and founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). McCarthy won the Turing Award in 1971.

Alan Turning (1912-1954) was an English computer scientist. Turing was instrumental in the development of computer science theory. He formalized computation with the Turing machine (part of the Church-Turing thesis). During WWII, Turing worked at Bletchley Park as a codebreaker. In his 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Turing devised the Turing test.

"Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine."

"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition."