In real life

WWOSD

—seen on a t-shirt in a North-American campus

Established Computer Scientists

• John Backus (BNF, string map down)
• Annette Bieniusa (effector)
• Richard Bird (call by name)
• Dines Bjørner (looping thrice in a row)
• William Burge (loop fusion)
• Edsger W. Dijkstra (astronomy and telescopes (allegedly), program testing, the humble programmer, recursion modeled with a stack, progress, complete testing, string map down)
• Philip Dreyfus (informatique)
• R. Kent Dybvig (patient observation)
• Yoshihiko Futamura (specializing an interpreter with respect to a program, specializing a specializer with respect to an interpreter, specializing a specializer with respect to a specializer)
• Michael J. C. Gordon (powerset)
• Hanne Gottliebsen (spinoff)
• Robert W. Harper (describing recursion)
• Neil D. Jones (binding times, computable functions, computable S-m-n function, self-applicable partial evaluation)
• Dave du Feu (powerset)
• Donald E. Knuth (tenet, early optimization)
• Peter J. Landin (syntactic sugar, principle of correspondence, mechanical evaluation, not the Beatles, loop fusion, call by value, told them, string map down)
• David B. MacQueen (ML as a domain-specific language)
• John McCarthy (a good idea at the time, string map down)
• Robin Milner (cannot go wrong, purism, string map down)
• Eugenio Moggi (effector)
• James H. Morris (observational equivalence)
• Peter Naur (datalogi, data science, BNF, string map down)
• Chris Okasaki (functional queues)
• Alan Perlis (every word can be verbed, building everything top-down, special case of something more general, constants and variables, a stark data structure, ten parameters, beware of the Turing tar-pit, low-level programming language)
• Gordon D. Plotkin (static types)
• John C. Reynolds (call by name, string map down)
• David A. Schmidt (compiler)
• Olin Shivers (what would he do, mine too)
• Brian C. Smith (reflective towers)
• Guy L. Steele Jr. (lambda interpreter)
• Karl Steinbuch (Informatik)
• Christopher Strachey (love letters, currying and uncurrying, generalized Cartesian product, string map down)
• Masato Takeichi (lambda-hoisting)
• Carolyn L. Talcott (transducers)
• Ken Thompson (grep)
• Alan Turing (the mathematical possibilities, string map down)
• Philip Wadler (listlessness)
• Mitchell Wand (call by value)

Young Computer Scientists

• Kira Kutscher (not a Magritte, fearlessly)
• Avery Snow (the RGB color model, representation as a relation)
• Gregory Teo (the knapsack problem)
• Leonard Tng (love letters in the 21st century, revisited)

Before Computer Science

We stand on their shoulders, but their heads are still taller than us:

• Aristotle (Greek chorus, four causes)
• Jacob Bernoulli (the lemniscate)
• Alonzo Church (encoding, string map down)
• Haskell Curry (currying and uncurrying, we go, string map down)
• René Descartes (therefore, product)
• Carl-Friedrich Gauss (notions and notations)
• David Hilbert (the Grand Hotel)
• Stephen Cole Kleene (S-m-n function, S-m-n theorem, we go)
• Gottfried Leibniz (calculemus)
• Giuseppe Peano (numerals)
• George Pólya (no problem)
• Plato (platonism)
• Willard Van Orman Quine (quotation)
• Bertrand Russell (turtles, induction step)
• Zeno of Elea (the half of it)

Outside Computer Science

• Isaac Asimov (that’s funny, in real life)
• Cyrano de Bergerac (and Pinocchio)
• Nicolas Boileau (clarity)
• Victor Borge (phonetic)
• Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles, stand-up philosopher)
• Albert Camus (adding to the unhappiness of the world)
• Coco Chanel (fashion)
• Pierre Dac (water pudding)
• Joe Dassin (façon)
• Umberto Eco (almost the same, not interrupting, the name of a rose, semiotics of stack overflows, the infinity of lists)
• Albert Einstein (difficulties)
• Gad Elmaleh (Brian is in the kitchen, Mimer is in the kitchen)
• Richard Feynman (some significance)
• Sigmund Freud (sometimes)
• Steven J. Green (Latin expertise)
• Émile Henriot (la culture)
• Piet Hein (Things Take Time)
• Robert A. Heinlein (all you zombies)
• Frank Herbert (the balances)
• Grace Jones (strange)
• Richard M. Jones (trouble with streams)
• Alphonse Karr (encore pareil)
• Søren Kierkegaard (forward and backward)
• Paul Lockhart (notions and notations)
• Louis XIV (c’est moi)
• René Magritte (not a pipe, approval, representation of representation)
• Queen Margrethe II of Denmark (Danish and French)
• Groucho Marx (joining a club)
• H. L. Mencken (The American Language)
• Wentworth Miller (the actor)
• Alfred Moessner (sieve)
• Art Neville (six strings down)
• Henrik Nordbrandt (the 15 months of the Danish year)
• Barack Obama (yes you can)
• George Orwell (equality is relative)
• Pink Floyd (pile on many more layers)
• Edgar Allan Poe (a string within a string)
• Calvin Russell (only the characters)
• Peter Schickele (quite a crowd)
• William Shakespeare (a play within a play, a name)
• Raymond Smullyan (both of them)
• Aaron Sorkin (a play within a play, handling the truth)
• Steven Stadnicki (multiple-choice questions)
• George Bernard Shaw (experience)
• Robert Louis Stevenson (parrot)
• Steven Strogatz (the Joy of x)
• Jimmy Vaughan (string map down)
• Stevie Ray Vaughan (dream)
• Voltaire (apocryphal)
• Mae West (too much of a good thing)
• Walter Jon Williams (not a game)
• Bill Withers (I know I know I know)
• Stevie Wonder (as, believing is not understanding, Songs in the Key of Life, but, ‘crastination)
• Lee Kuan Yew (not just learning a language)
• Mao Zedong (mechanism vs. solution)

Way outside Computer Science

• The Beatles (take a sad song)
• J. J. Cale (cosine)
• Orson Scott Card (which way)
• Eric Clapton (your name, cosine)
• Deep Purple (water)
• Bob Dylan (how many roads)
• The Eagles (checking out)
• Robert Frost (dark and deep, beginnings and endings)
• Otto Harbach (smoke)
• Buddy Holly (be the day)
• Jerome Kern (smoke)
• Douglas MacArthur (never quit)
• Bob Marley (also shot)
• Marilyn Monroe (learning as a baby)
• Procol Harum (the light fandango)
• The Rolling Stones (dragging away)

Version

Added Masato Takeichi [24 Nov 2024]

Added Avery Snow [30 Jan 2024]

Added Joe Dassin [16 Apr 2023]

Added Annette Bieniusa, Richard Bird, Eugenio Moggi, David Schmidt, Guy Steele, and Mitchell Wand [25 Mar 2023]

Added Raymond Smullyan [10 Mar 2023]

Added George Pólya [11 Jan 2023]

Created [10 Jan 2023]