Turned a projector, a camera and coloured tape into a wearable computer years before smartwatches existed
Growing up in a small town in Gujarat with little access to computers, he went on to build SixthSense, a wearable gesture-based device that projected…
Locked up as a suspected communist, then deported, so he went home and built China's missile program
A co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who helped interrogate German rocket scientists in 1945, he was stripped of his clearance in 1950, held…
Designed the Spitfire while dying of cancer and never saw it fight
A locomotive apprentice from the Potteries who studied at night, he became chief designer at Supermarine at 24, won the Schneider Trophy outright,…
Solved a problem holding back computer networks in a weekend and wrote the algorithm as a poem
She invented the spanning tree protocol that lets network switches find their way without loops, a piece of plumbing so basic that almost every…
Expelled from school in Nazi Germany, he invented the home video game console in a defence contractor's office
Thrown out of school at eleven for being Jewish, he escaped Germany with his family in 1938 and taught himself electronics. In 1966 he wrote a…
Built technology that reads human emotion after her own laptop never noticed hers
Raised between Cairo and Kuwait in a family that expected an early marriage, she instead studied computer science, moved to Cambridge for a PhD, and…
Built the first railway locomotive and died without the money to pay for his own funeral
A Cornish mine captain's son who was written off at school, he put the first steam locomotive on rails in 1804, lost everything chasing silver in…
Directed the operations that put an Indian spacecraft into orbit around Mars on the first attempt
A schoolgirl in Lucknow who cut out newspaper clippings about space missions, she became a rare woman in India's aerospace establishment and helped…
The first African woman admitted to a French Grande Ecole went on to lead an AI research team
A brilliant student from Senegal who broke into France's most selective engineering schools when almost no African women were admitted, she spent her…
Led the science behind the Arab world's first mission to another planet
A computer scientist by training, she became science lead of the Emirates Mars Mission, built with a team whose average age was under 35, and helped…
Sent to the gulag by Stalin, he came back to put the first satellite and the first man into space
Arrested and beaten in the purges, he survived a Siberian gold mine to become the anonymous Chief Designer behind Sputnik and Gagarin. His name was a…
A would-be comic artist who was handed a pile of failed arcade cabinets and turned them into Donkey Kong
Hired by Nintendo as a staff artist through his father's connections, he was asked in 1981 to salvage unsold arcade machines and created Mario. His…
Ordered by his company to stop, he built the blue LED anyway, was paid a small bonus, and sued
An engineer at a small chemicals company on the island of Shikoku, he attacked a problem the big laboratories had given up on and made the bright…
Designed the BBC Micro in a week and the ARM chip inside almost every phone on earth
A Cambridge student who built her first computer during a summer holiday, she designed the BBC Micro prototype in five days and then the ARM…
Arrived on the Kindertransport at five and built a software company staffed by women at home
A child refugee who signed her business letters "Steve" so men would answer, she founded a software firm in 1962 that employed mothers working from…
Became the first woman to lead an Indian missile programme in a field almost entirely run by men
Raised by a widowed mother in a fishing town in Kerala, she studied engineering against expectation and rose through India's defence research…
Three months of schooling, nearly deaf, and more than a thousand patents
Sent home from school as a hopeless case, he sold newspapers on trains as a boy and went on to build the first industrial research laboratory, the…
Invented the World Wide Web and gave it away for free
Working at a physics lab in Switzerland, he wrote the software for the web in his spare time and refused to patent it, which is why the web is open…
Fled conflict as a teenager and became one of AI's most outspoken critics from inside a top research lab
Forced to leave Ethiopia as a teenager during the war with Eritrea, she rebuilt her education in the United States, became a leading researcher on…
Built the first electronic computer with his own money and was ordered to keep quiet for 30 years
A bricklayer's son from the East End, he built Colossus to break Hitler's most secret cipher when the experts said it could not work, paid for parts…
A stuntman who invented the wind-up radio for Africa, then lost control of it and died with little to show
A swimmer, circus escape artist and pool salesman who taught himself engineering, he built the first clockwork radio in half an hour after watching a…
Queen Victoria's goddaughter who went to sea as a marine engineer and held a bombed ship together alone
Britain's first woman marine engineer, she failed her chief engineer's exam dozens of times on grounds that had nothing to do with her ability, then…
Hard of hearing since childhood, he co-wrote the rules that let every computer on earth talk to each other
Born with a hearing impairment, he found that typed messages between computers suited him better than the telephone. With Bob Kahn he designed…
An anonymous Facebook page he built helped bring down a government he never named himself in
A Google marketing manager trained as a computer engineer, he anonymously built a Facebook page around a young man beaten to death by police, then…
