Standing on their shoulders

Mathematician, codebreaker, father of computer science

Formalized what it means to "compute" before a general-purpose computer existed, then spent the war putting that theory to work at Bletchley Park breaking the Enigma cipher — shortening World War II by an estimated two years. Every program that has ever run, including this one, runs on the machine model he described in 1936.

“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”

Creator of C, co-creator of Unix

Wrote the C programming language and, with Ken Thompson, built Unix — the direct ancestor of Linux, macOS, and every cloud server this app is deployed on. Nearly every layer of market-wall's stack, from the database to the edge functions, sits on top of ideas the two of them worked out at Bell Labs in the early 1970s.

“UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.”