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John Napier
He further used the Book of Revelation for chronography, to predict the Apocalypse, in A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1593), which he regarded as his most important work; he also applied the Sibylline Oracles, to calculate the date of the end of the world. Napier believed that would occur in 1688 or 1700. He dated the seventh trumpet to 1541. -
Blaise Pascal
His Traité du triangle arithmétique ("Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle") described a convenient tabular presentation for binomial coefficients, now called Pascal's triangle. -
Charles Babbage
He invented the pilot (also called a cow-catcher), the metal frame attached to the front of locomotives that clears the tracks of obstacles; he also constructed a dynamometer car. -
Lady Augusta Ada
Babbage's friend Charles Wheatstone commissioned Ada to translate Menabrea's paper into English. She then augmented the paper with notes, which were added to the translation. Ada spent the better part of a year doing this, assisted with input from Babbage. These notes, which are more extensive than Menabrea's paper, were then published in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs under the initialism AAL. -
Alan Turning
He proved the central limit theorem -
Howard Aiken
He envisioned an electro-mechanical computing device that could do much of the tedious work for him. This computer was originally called the ASCC (Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator) and later renamed Harvard Mark I. With engineering, construction, and funding from IBM, the machine was completed and installed at Harvard in February, 1944 -
Jack Kilby
On September 12 he presented his findings to the management, which included Mark Shepherd: he showed them a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached, pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave, proving that his integrated circuit worked and thus that he solved the problem. U.S. Patent 3,138,743 for "Miniaturized Electronic Circuits", the first integrated circuit, was filed on February 6, 1959 -
Bill Gates
His company Microsoft was approached by IBM
