Bradley University Computer Science & Information Systems

01/31/2023

Happy Birthday to the Benevolent Dictator for Life, Guido van Rossum. The inventor of the Python programming language and a bit of a colorful personality.

Guido van Rossum (Dutch: [ˈɣido vɑn ˈrɔsʏm, -səm]; born 31 January 1956) is a Dutch programmer best known as the creator of the Python programming language, for which he was the "benevolent dictator for life" (BDFL) until he stepped down from the position on 12 July 2018.[4][5] He remained a...

12/09/2022

Happy Birthday to Grace Hopper! Admiral/Dr Hopper was the first to theorize about a machine-independent programming language and thus the idea of a compiler. And so much more...

Grace Brewster Hopper (née Murray; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral.[1] One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first l...

11/08/2022

Happy Birthday to everyone's first friend on MySpace, Tom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Anderson

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/06/20/00/29CAF9C200000578-0-image-a-39_1434756545679.jpg

11/07/2022

Happy Birthday to Barbara Liskov who in 2008 was recognized with the Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science. She is noteworthy for introducing the Liskov Principle, the L in SOLID, which describes 5 important aspects of object-oriented programming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Liskov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID

Barbara Liskov (born November 7, 1939 as Barbara Jane Huberman) is an American computer scientist who has made pioneering contributions to programming languages and distributed computing. Her notable work includes the development of the Liskov substitution principle which describes the fundamental n...

10/18/2022

Happy Birthday to Beatrice Worsley, a Canadian computer scientist who was awarded the first Ph.D. in what would become the field of computer science in 1954 for her thesis with the title "Serial Programming for Real and Idealised Digital Calculating Machines".

Beatrice Helen Worsley (18 October 1921 – 8 May 1972) was a Canadian computer scientist who was the first female computer scientist in Canada. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge with Maurice Wilkes as adviser, the first Ph.D. granted in what would today be known as comp...

09/28/2022

Happy Birthday to Seymour Cray, the "father of supercomputing". Cray is credited for the creation of the supercomputer industry and was the founder of the supercomputing company that bears his name, Cray Research. At one point early in his career, so a story goes, his management asked him for his 1-year and 5-year goals, to which he wrote "Five-year goal: Build the biggest computer in the world. One year goal: One-fifth of the above."

Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925[1] – October 5, 1996[2]) was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which built many of these machines. Called "the father of su...

09/13/2022

It's the 256th day of the year! That makes it the Day of the Programmer!

The number 256 (2^8) was chosen for the Day of the Programmer because it is the number of distinct values that can be represented with a byte, a value well known to programmers.

The Day of the Programmer is an international professional day that is celebrated on the 256th (hexadecimal 100th, or the 28th) day of each year (September 13 during common years and on September 12 in leap years).

09/09/2022

Happy Birthday to Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language, and one of the key developers of the Unix operating system.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – c. October 12, 2011) was an American computer scientist.[1] He is most well-known for creating the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system and B programming language.[1] Ritchie and Thompson were a...

08/19/2022

Happy Birthday to Edgar F. Codd who invented the relational model that is behind nearly all modern databases (like MySQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server just to name a few). He's the Codd in Boyce-Codd normal form.

Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd (19 August 1923 – 18 April 2003) was an English computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases and relational database management systems. He made other valuable contributio...

08/17/2022

Happy Birthday to Margaret Hamilton. Margaret was director of the software engineering team that developed the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. She is also credit as being one of the first people to begin using the term "software engineering". She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

Margaret Heafield Hamilton (born August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. She later founde...

08/15/2022

What is Dr. Byerly up to?

08/12/2022

Did Google achieve Quantum Supremacy 3 years ago? At the time, yes, but recently a team of researchers in China was able to accomplish the same task Sycamore (Google's quantum computer) did with classical computation in a similar timeframe. Still, the race is on!

Superfast algorithm put crimp in 2019 claim that Google’s machine had achieved “quantum supremacy”