These people are famous computer scientists:
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955),[1] also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, HTML, the URL system, and HTTP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
Lamport was the winner of the 2013 Turing Award for imposing clear, well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behavior of distributed computing systems, in which several autonomous computers communicate with each other by passing messages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport
His research interests include complexity theory, parallel algorithms, graph theory, cryptography, and distributed computing. Wigderson received the Abel Prize in 2021 for his work in theoretical computer science. He also received the 2023 Turing Award for his contributions to the understanding of randomness in the theory of computation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avi_Wigderson
Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning. Bengio received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing”, together with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, for their foundational work on deep learning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshua_Bengio
Virginia Vassilevska Williams (née Virginia Panayotova Vassilevska)[1] is a theoretical computer scientist and mathematician known for her research in computational complexity theory and algorithms.
She is notable for her breakthrough results in fast matrix multiplication, for her work on dynamic algorithms, and for helping to develop the field of fine-grained complexity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Vassilevska_Williams
What sorcery is this? 🤔🤔🤔
Take for instance this dude:
Richard Ryan Williams, known as Ryan Williams (born 1979), is an American theoretical computer scientist working in computational complexity theory and algorithms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Williams_(computer_scientist)
Wait…WHAT?
What the hell does a “computer scientist” actually do?
This question sounds simple. But the answer is not simple at all. Please explain. Thanks.
Computer Science is basically just a Frankenstein amalgamation of interconnected subjects related to computers that have been useful for universities to lump together for teaching and/or funding purposes. I have a Bachelor’s degree in it. Most of the courses were split between either more “theoretical” / math-y courses on discrete math, probability, “Theory of Computation”, etc. (where we were mostly solving math problems/writing proofs) or practical programming courses on things like “Intro to Java”, “Debugging”, and “Software Engineering Best Practices”, etc. (where we were mostly writing programs). Some met in the middle – e.g. Algorithms, which got into things like graph theory and complexity classes while also requiring us to write programs. The traditional “hard” courses also included compilers and operating systems where we were supposed to learn enough to build at least toy versions of both. I also had digital logic courses that got into to the boundary between programming and electrical engineering (but without going too deeply into how electronics physically works or is manufactured) – e.g. covering logic gates, state machines, the design (but not physical implementation) of CPUs, Verilog, etc.
Basically a “computer scientist” is someone who does something academically interesting about/with computers – either on the mathematics of what can be computed, or on the practical applications of computer technology. Most people who study it go on to become professional programmers rather than academics though.