Sir Tim Berners-Lee OM KBE FRS RDI FRSA DFBCS FREng
Berners-Lee in 2024
Born	Timothy John Berners-Lee (1955-06-08) 8 June 1955 (age 69) London, England
Other names	TimBL TBL
Education	Queen's College, Oxford (BA)
Known for	Invention of the World Wide Web
Spouses	Nancy Carlson (m. 1990; div. 2011) Rosemary Leith (m. 2014)
Children	2 children 3 step-children
Parents	Conway Berners-Lee (father) Mary Lee Woods (mother)
Awards	Turing Award (2016) Queen Elizabeth Prize (2013) Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (2009) Order of Merit (2007) ACM Software System Award (1995)

Scientific career
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	CERN Massachusetts Institute of Technology World Wide Web Consortium University of Oxford University of Southampton


Website	w3.org/People/Berners-Lee
Signature

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, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow at the University of Oxford^[2] and a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).^[3]^[4]

Berners-Lee proposed an information management system on 12 March 1989^[5]^[6] and implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet in mid-November.^[7]^[8]^[9]^[10]^[11] He devised and implemented the first Web browser and Web server and helped foster the Web's subsequent development. He is the founder and emeritus director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the continued development of the Web. He co-founded (with Rosemary Leith) the World Wide Web Foundation. In April 2009, he was elected as Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences.^[12]^[13]

Berners-Lee was previously a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com founder's chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).^[14] He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI)^[15] and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.^[16]^[17] In 2011, he was named as a member of the board of trustees of the Ford Foundation.^[18] He is a founder and president of the Open Data Institute and is currently an advisor at social network MeWe.^[19] In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work.^[20]^[21] He received the 2016 Turing Award "for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale".^[22] He was named in Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century and has received a number of other accolades for his invention.^[23]

Early life

[edit]

Berners-Lee was born in London on 8 June 1955,^[24] the son of mathematicians and computer scientists Mary Lee Woods (1924–2017) and Conway Berners-Lee (1921–2019). His parents were both from Birmingham and worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, the first commercially-built computer. He has three younger siblings; his brother, Mike, is a professor of ecology and climate change management.

Berners-Lee attended Sheen Mount Primary School, then attended Emanuel School (a direct grant grammar school at the time) from 1969 to 1973.^[1]^[20] A keen trainspotter as a child, he learnt about electronics from tinkering with a model railway.^[25]

From 1973 to 1976, he studied at The Queen's College, Oxford, where he received a first-class BA in physics.^[1]^[24] While there, he made a computer out of an old television set he had purchased from a repair shop.^[26]

Career and research

[edit]

After graduation, Berners-Lee worked as an engineer at the telecommunications company Plessey in Poole, Dorset.^[24] In 1978, he joined D. G. Nash in Ferndown, Dorset, where he helped create typesetting software for printers.^[24]

Berners-Lee worked as an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980. While in Geneva, he proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers.^[27] To demonstrate it, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE.^[28]

After leaving CERN in late 1980, he went to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems, Ltd, in Bournemouth, Dorset.^[29] He ran the company's technical side for three years.^[30] The project he worked on was a "real-time remote procedure call" which gave him experience in computer networking.^[29] In 1984, he returned to CERN as a fellow.^[28]

In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet:

I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web.
— Tim Berners-Lee^[31]

Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult when I was working at CERN later. Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together. It was a step of generalising, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system.
— Tim Berners-Lee^[32]

Berners-Lee wrote his proposal in March 1989 and, in 1990, redistributed it. It then was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall, who called his proposals "vague, but exciting".^[33] Robert Cailliau had independently proposed a project to develop a hypertext system at CERN, and joined Berners-Lee as a partner in his efforts to get the web off the ground.^[28] They used similar ideas to those underlying the ENQUIRE system to create the World Wide Web, for which Berners-Lee designed and built the first web browser. His software also functioned as an editor (called WorldWideWeb, running on the NeXTSTEP operating system), and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol daemon).

Berners-Lee published the first web site, which described the project itself, on 20 December 1990; it was available to the Internet from the CERN network. The site provided an explanation of what the World Wide Web was, and how people could use a browser and set up a web server, as well as how to get started with your own website.^[34]^[35]^[36]^[26] On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee first posted, on Usenet, a public invitation for collaboration with the WorldWideWeb project.^[37]

In a list of 80 cultural moments that shaped the world, chosen by a panel of 25 eminent scientists, academics, writers and world leaders in 2016, the invention of the World Wide Web was ranked number one, with the entry stating, "The fastest growing communications medium of all time, the Internet has changed the shape of modern life forever. We can connect with each other instantly, all over the world."^[38]

In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the W3C at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. Berners-Lee made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that its standards should be based on royalty-free technology, so that they easily could be adopted by anyone.^[39]

Berners-Lee participated in Curl Corp's attempt to develop and promote the Curl programming language.^[40]

In 2001, Berners-Lee became a patron of the East Dorset Heritage Trust, having previously lived in Colehill in Wimborne, East Dorset.^[41] In December 2004, he accepted a chair in computer science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Hampshire, to work on the Semantic Web.^[42]^[43]

In a Times article in October 2009, Berners-Lee admitted that the initial pair of slashes ("//") in a web address were "unnecessary". He told the newspaper that he easily could have designed web addresses without the slashes. "There you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time," he said in his lighthearted apology.^[44]

Policy work

[edit]

Tim Berners-Lee at the Home Office, London, on 11 March 2010

By 2010, he created data.gov.uk alongside Nigel Shadbolt. Commenting on the Ordnance Survey data in April 2010, Berners-Lee said: "The changes signal a wider cultural change in government based on an assumption that information should be in the public domain unless there is a good reason not to—not the other way around." He went on to say: "Greater openness, accountability and transparency in Government will give people greater choice and make it easier for individuals to get more directly involved in issues that matter to them."^[45]

In November 2009, Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF).^[46]

Berners-Lee is one of the pioneer voices in favour of net neutrality,^[47] and has expressed the view that ISPs should supply "connectivity with no strings attached", and should neither control nor monitor the browsing activities of customers without their expressed consent.^[48]^[49] He advocates the idea that net neutrality is a kind of human network right: "Threats to the Internet, such as companies or governments that interfere with or snoop on Internet traffic, compromise basic human network rights."^[50] Berners-Lee participated in an open letter to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC). He and 20 other Internet pioneers urged the FCC to cancel a vote on 14 December 2017 to uphold net neutrality. The letter was addressed to Senator Roger Wicker, Senator Brian Schatz, Representative Marsha Blackburn and Representative Michael F. Doyle.^[51]

Berners-Lee was honoured as the "Inventor of the World Wide Web" during the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, in which he appeared working with a vintage NeXT Computer.^[52] He tweeted "This is for everyone"^[53] which appeared in LED lights attached to the chairs of the audience.^[52]

Berners-Lee joined the board of advisors of start-up State.com, based in London.^[54] As of May 2012, he is president of the Open Data Institute,^[55] which he co-founded with Nigel Shadbolt in 2012.

The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) was launched in October 2013, and Berners-Lee is leading the coalition of public and private organisations that includes Google, Facebook, Intel and Microsoft. The A4AI seeks to make Internet access more affordable so that access is broadened in the developing world, where only 31% of people are online. Berners-Lee will work with those aiming to decrease Internet access prices so that they fall below the UN Broadband Commission's worldwide target of 5% of monthly income.^[56]

Berners-Lee holds the founders chair in Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he heads the Decentralized Information Group and is leading Solid, a joint project with the Qatar Computing Research Institute that aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy.^[57] In October 2016, he joined the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University as a professorial research fellow^[58] and as a fellow of Christ Church, one of the Oxford colleges.^[59]

From the mid-2010s, Berners-Lee initially remained neutral on the emerging Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) proposal with its controversial digital rights management (DRM) implications.^[60] In March 2017 he felt he had to take a position which was to support the EME proposal.^[60] He reasoned EME's virtues whilst noting DRM was inevitable.^[60] As W3C director, he went on to approve the finalised specification in July 2017.^[61]^[60] His stance was opposed by some including Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the anti-DRM campaign Defective by Design and the Free Software Foundation.^[61] Varied concerns raised included being not supportive of the Internet's open philosophy against commercial interests and risks of users being forced to use a particular web browser to view specific DRM content.^[60] The EFF raised a formal appeal which did not succeed and the EME specification became a formal W3C recommendation in September 2017.^[62]

On 30 September 2018, Berners-Lee announced his new open-source startup Inrupt to fuel a commercial ecosystem around the Solid project, which aims to give users more control over their personal data and lets them choose where the data goes, who's allowed to see certain elements and which apps are allowed to see that data.^[63]^[64]

In November 2019, at the Internet Governance Forum in Berlin, Berners-Lee and the WWWF launched Contract for the Web, a campaign initiative to persuade governments, companies and citizens to commit to nine principles to stop "misuse", with the warning that "if we don't act now – and act together – to prevent the web being misused by those who want to exploit, divide and undermine, we are at risk of squandering [its potential for good]".^[65]

Awards and honours

[edit]

"He wove the World Wide Web and created a mass medium for the 21st century. The World Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He designed it. He loosed it on the world. And he more than anyone else has fought to keep it open, nonproprietary and free."

—Tim Berners-Lee's entry in Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century, March 1999.^[23]

Berners-Lee has received many awards and honours. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in the 2004 New Year Honours "for services to the global development of the Internet", and was invested formally on 16 July 2004.^[20]^[21]

On 13 June 2007, he was appointed to the Order of Merit (OM), an order restricted to 24 living members, plus any honorary members.^[66] Bestowing membership of the Order of Merit is within the personal purview of the Sovereign and does not require recommendation by ministers or the Prime Minister.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2001.^[67] He was also elected as a member into the American Philosophical Society in 2004^[68] and the National Academy of Engineering in 2007.

He has been conferred honorary degrees from a number of universities around the world, including Manchester (his parents worked on the Manchester Mark 1 in the 1940s), Harvard and Yale.^[69]^[70]^[71]

In 2012, Berners-Lee was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life that he most admires to mark his 80th birthday.^[72]^[73]

In 2013, he was awarded the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.^[74] On 4 April 2017, he received the 2016 Association for Computing Machinery's Turing Award for his invention of the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and their fundamental protocols and algorithms.^[22]

Personal life

[edit]

Berners-Lee has said "I like to keep work and personal life separate."^[75]

Berners-Lee married Nancy Carlson, an American computer programmer, in 1990. She was also working in Switzerland at the World Health Organization.^[76] They had two children and divorced in 2011. In 2014, he married Rosemary Leith at the Chapel Royal, St. James's Palace in London.^[77] Leith is a Canadian Internet and banking entrepreneur and a founding director of Berners-Lee's World Wide Web Foundation.^[78] The couple also collaborate on venture capital to support artificial intelligence companies.^[79]

Berners-Lee was raised as an Anglican, but he turned away from religion in his youth. After he became a parent, he became a Unitarian Universalist (UU).^[80] When asked whether he believes in God, he stated: "Not in the sense of most people, I'm atheist and Unitarian Universalist."^[81]

The web's source code was auctioned by Sotheby's in London during 23–30 June 2021, as a non-fungible token (NFT) by TimBL.^[82]^[83]^[84] Selling for US$5,434,500,^[85] it was reported the proceeds would be used to fund initiatives by TimBL and Leith.^[84]^[82]

References

[edit]

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^ "Tim Berners-Lee". Department of Computer Science. Retrieved 27 May 2020.
^ "Sir Tim Berners-Lee joins Oxford's Department of Computer Science". ox.ac.uk. University of Oxford. 27 October 2016. Retrieved 18 September 2018.
^ "Tim Berners-Lee | MIT CSAIL". www.csail.mit.edu. Retrieved 19 September 2021.
^ Foundation, Web (12 March 2019). "30 years on, what's next #ForTheWeb?". World Wide Web Foundation.
^ "info.cern.ch – Tim Berners-Lee's proposal". cern.ch. Info.cern.ch. Retrieved 21 December 2011.
^ Tim Berners Lee's own reference. The exact date is unknown.
^ Berners-Lee, Tim; Mark Fischetti (1999). Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by its inventor. Britain: Orion Business. ISBN 978-0-7528-2090-3.
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^ Shadbolt, N.; Berners-Lee, T. (2008). "Web science emerges". Scientific American. 299 (4): 76–81. Bibcode:2008SciAm.299d..76S. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1008-76. PMID 18847088.
^ Berners-Lee, T.; Hall, W.; Hendler, J.; Shadbolt, N.; Weitzner, D. (2006). "Computer Science: Enhanced: Creating a Science of the Web". Science. 313 (5788): 769–771. doi:10.1126/science.1126902. PMID 16902115. S2CID 5104030.
^ "Timothy Berners-Lee Elected to National Academy of Sciences". Dr. Dobb's Journal. Retrieved 9 June 2009.
^ "72 New Members Chosen By Academy" (Press release). United States National Academy of Sciences. 28 April 2009. Retrieved 17 January 2011.
^ Schorow, Stephanie (5 January 2007). "Draper Prize". mit.edu. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
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^ "MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (homepage)". mit.edu. Cci.mit.edu. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
^ "MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (people)". Cci.mit.edu. Archived from the original on 11 June 2010. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
^ Bratt, Steve (29 September 2011). "Sir Tim Berners-Lee Named to the Ford Foundation Board". World Wide Foundation. Retrieved 22 August 2017.
^ Shukman, Harry; Bridge, Mark (8 January 2019). "Sir Tim Berners-Lee's app MeWe is used by neo-Nazis and perverts". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460. Retrieved 12 March 2019.
^ ^a ^b ^c "Web's inventor gets a knighthood". BBC News. 31 December 2003. Retrieved 10 November 2015.
^ ^a ^b "Creator of the web turns knight". BBC News. 16 July 2004. Retrieved 10 November 2015.
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^ ^a ^b Quittner, Joshua (29 March 1999). "Tim Berners Lee—Time 100 People of the Century". Time Magazine. Archived from the original on 16 October 2007.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d "Berners-Lee Longer Biography". w3.org. World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 18 January 2011.
^ Edgecliffe-Johnson, Andrew (7 September 2012). "Lunch with the FT: Tim Berners-Lee". Financial Times. Archived from the original on 10 December 2022. Retrieved 11 June 2017.
^ ^a ^b "He caught us all in the Web!". The Hindu. 1 September 2018. ISSN 0971-751X. Retrieved 2 September 2018.
^ "Berners-Lee's original proposal to CERN". w3.org. World Wide Web Consortium. March 1989. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
^ ^a ^b ^c Stewart, Bill. "Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, and the World Wide Web". Retrieved 22 July 2010.
^ ^a ^b Berners-Lee, Tim. "Frequently asked questions". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 22 July 2010.
^ Grossman, Wendy (15 July 1996). "All you never knew about the Net ...". The Independent.
^ Berners-Lee, Tim. "Answers for Young People". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
^ "Visionary of the Internet". www.achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement. 22 June 2007.
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^ Van der Hiel, Amy (4 August 2016). "25 Years ago the world changed forever". W3C. Retrieved 5 August 2021.
^ "80 moments that shaped the world". British Council. Archived from the original on 30 June 2016. Retrieved 13 May 2016.
^ "Patent Policy—5 February 2004". World Wide Web Consortium. 5 February 2004. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
^ "Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants 'personal empowerment' for users, through his data startup". The Boston Globe. 29 December 2020.
^ Klooster, John W., (2009), Icons of Invention: the makers of the modern world from Gutenberg to Gates, ABC-CLIO, p. 611.
^ Berners-Lee, T.; Hendler, J.; Lassila, O. (2001). "The Semantic Web". Scientific American. 2841 (5): 34. Bibcode:2001SciAm.284e..34B. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0501-34.
^ "Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web inventor, to join ECS". World Wide Web Consortium. 2 December 2004. Retrieved 25 May 2008.
^ "Berners-Lee 'sorry' for slashes". BBC. 14 October 2009. Retrieved 14 October 2009.
^ "Ordnance Survey offers free data access". BBC News. 1 April 2010. Retrieved 3 April 2009.
^ FAQ—World Wide Web Foundation. Retrieved 18 January 2011.
^ Ghosh, Pallab (15 September 2008). "Web creator rejects net tracking". BBC. Retrieved 15 September 2008. Warning sounded on web's future.
^ Cellan-Jones, Rory (March 2008). "Web creator rejects net tracking". BBC. Retrieved 25 May 2008. Sir Tim rejects net tracking like Phorm.
^ Adams, Stephen (March 2008). "Web inventor's warning on spy software". The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 22 May 2008. Retrieved 25 May 2008. Sir Tim rejects net tracking like Phorm.
^ Berners, Tim (December 2010). "Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality". Scientific American. Retrieved 21 December 2011.
^ "Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, and 19 other technologists pen letter asking FCC to save net neutrality". VB News. Retrieved 14 December 2017
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^ ^a ^b Berners-Lee, Tim (27 July 2012). "This is for everyone". Twitter. Retrieved 28 July 2012.
^ "State.com/about/people". Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 9 September 2013.
^ Computing, Government (23 May 2012). "Government commits £10m to Open Data Institute". The Guardian.
^ Gibbs, Samuel (7 October 2013). "Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Google lead coalition for cheaper internet". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 October 2013.
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^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e McCarthy, Kieren (6 March 2017). "Sir Tim Berners-Lee refuses to be King Canute, approves DRM as Web standard". The Register. Situation Publishing. Archived from the original on 5 October 2018. Retrieved 30 May 2019.
^ ^a ^b Cardoza, Christina (7 July 2017). "DRM concerns arise as W3C's Tim Berners-Lee approves the EME specification". SD Times. BZ Media LLC. Archived from the original on 30 May 2019. Retrieved 12 March 2019.
^ McCarthy, Kieren (18 September 2017). "DRM now a formal Web recommendation after protest vote fails". The Register. Situation Publishing. Archived from the original on 27 February 2019. Retrieved 30 May 2019.
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^ "Harvard awards 9 honorary degrees", Harvard Gazette, 26 May 2011. Retrieved 28 May 2016.
^ Davies, Caroline (5 October 2016). "New faces on Sgt Pepper album cover for artist Peter Blake's 80th birthday". The Guardian.
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^ "Sir Tim Berners-Lee Receives Inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, 2013". Web foundation.org. 18 March 2013.
^ "Frequently asked questions by the Press – Tim BL". www.w3.org. Retrieved 10 September 2020.
^ "Nancy Carlson Is Wed to Timothy Berners-Lee". The New York Times. 15 July 1990. Retrieved 22 June 2018.
^ "Ms Rosemary Leith and Sir Tim Berners-Lee are delighted to announce that they celebrated their marriage on 20 June 2014...." World Wide Web Foundation.
^ "Rosemary Leith". World Wide Web Foundation. 25 June 2013. Retrieved 23 June 2018.
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^ "Faces of the week". 26 September 2003 – via news.bbc.co.uk.
^ Döpfner, Mathias. "The inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the internet, 'fake news,' and why net neutrality is so important". Business Insider. Retrieved 24 December 2019.
^ ^a ^b "NFT representing Tim Berners-Lee's source code for the web to go on sale". theguardian.com. theguardian.com. 15 June 2021. Retrieved 15 June 2021.
^ "This Changed Everything: Source Code for WWW x Tim Berners-Lee, an NFT". sothebys.com. Retrieved 15 June 2021.
^ ^a ^b "The web's source code is being auctioned as an NFT by inventor Tim Berners-Lee". cnbc.com. cnbc.com. 15 June 2021. Retrieved 15 June 2021.
^ Lawler, Richard (30 June 2021). "Sir Tim Berners-Lee's web source code NFT sells for $5.4 million". The Verge. VOX Media. Retrieved 30 June 2021.

Further reading

[edit]

Tim Berners-Lee's publications
Tim Berners-Lee and the Development of the World Wide Web (Unlocking the Secrets of Science) (Mitchell Lane Publishers, 2001), ISBN 1-58415-096-3
Tim Berners-Lee: Inventor of the World Wide Web (Ferguson's Career Biographies), Melissa Stewart (Ferguson Publishing Company, 2001), ISBN 0-89434-367-X children's biography
How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web, Robert Cailliau, James Gillies, R. Cailliau (Oxford University Press, 2000), ISBN 0-19-286207-3
Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Fischetti (Paw Prints, 2008)
"Man Who Invented the World Wide Web Gives it New Definition" Archived 12 April 2011 at the Wayback Machine, Compute Magazine, 11 February 2011
BBC2 Newsnight – Transcript of video interview of Berners-Lee on the read/write Web
Technology Review interview Archived 28 November 2011 at the Wayback Machine
Brooker, Katrina (August 2018). ""I Was Devastated": Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets". Vanity Fair.

External links

[edit]

Tim Berners-Lee on the W3C site
List of Tim Berners-Lee publications on W3C site
Tim Berners-Lee at TED
Appearances on C-SPAN

Preceded by First recipient	Millennium Technology Prize winner 2004 (for the World Wide Web)	Succeeded by Shuji Nakamura

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v t e Charles Stark Draper Prize recipients
1980s	Jack Kilby / Robert Noyce (1989)
1990s	Frank Whittle / Hans von Ohain (1991) John Backus (1993) John R. Pierce / Harold A. Rosen (1995) Vladimir Haensel (1997) Charles K. Kao / Robert D. Maurer / John B. MacChesney (1999)
2000s	Vinton Cerf / Bob Kahn / Leonard Kleinrock / Lawrence G. Roberts (2001) Robert Langer (2002) Ivan Getting / Bradford Parkinson (2003) Alan Kay / Butler Lampson / Robert Taylor / Charles P. Thacker (2004) Minoru S. Araki / Francis J. Madden / Edward A. Miller / James W. Plummer / Don H. Schoessler (2005) Willard Boyle / George E. Smith (2006) Tim Berners-Lee (2007) Rudolf E. Kálmán (2008) Robert H. Dennard (2009)
2010s	Frances Arnold / Willem P. C. Stemmer (2011) George H. Heilmeier / Wolfgang Helfrich / Martin Schadt / T. Peter Brody (2012) Thomas Haug / Martin Cooper / Yoshihisa Okumura / Richard H. Frenkiel / Joel S. Engel (2013) John B. Goodenough / Yoshio Nishi / Rachid Yazami / Akira Yoshino (2014) Isamu Akasaki / George Craford / Russell Dupuis / Nick Holonyak / Shuji Nakamura (2015) Andrew Viterbi (2016) Bjarne Stroustrup (2018)
2020s	Jean Fréchet / C. Grant Willson (2020) Steve Furber / John L. Hennessy / David Patterson / Sophie Wilson (2022)

v t e Japan Prize recipients
1980s	John R. Pierce / Ephraim Katchalski-Katzir (1985) David Turnbull / Willem J. Kolff (1986) Henry Beachell / Gurdev Khush / Theodore Maiman (1987) Georges Vendryes / Donald Henderson / Isao Arita / Frank Fenner / Luc Montagnier / Robert Gallo (1988) Frank Sherwood Rowland / Elias James Corey (1989)
1990s	Marvin Minsky / W. Jason Morgan / Dan McKenzie / Xavier Le Pichon (1990) Jacques-Louis Lions / John J. Wild (1991) Gerhard Ertl / Ernest John Christopher Polge (1992) Frank Press / Kary B. Mullis (1993) William Hayward Pickering / Arvid Carlsson (1994) Nick Holonyak Jr. / Edward F. Knipling (1995) Charles K. Kao / Masao Ito (1996) Takashi Sugimura / Bruce Ames / Joseph Engelberger / Hiroyuki Yoshikawa (1997) Leo Esaki / Jozef Schell / Marc Van Montagu (1998) W. Wesley Peterson / Jack L. Strominger / Don Craig Wiley (1999)
2000s	Ian McHarg / Kimishige Ishizaka (2000) John B. Goodenough / Timothy R. Parsons (2001) Tim Berners-Lee / Anne McLaren / Andrzej Tarkowski (2002) Benoit Mandelbrot / James A. Yorke / Seiji Ogawa (2003) Kenichi Honda / Akira Fujishima / Keith J. Sainsbury / John H. Lawton (2004) Makoto Nagao / Masatoshi Takeichi / Erkki Ruoslahti (2005) John Houghton / Akira Endo (2006) Albert Fert / Peter Grünberg / Peter Shaw Ashton (2007) Vint Cerf / Robert E. Kahn / Victor A. McKusick (2008) Dennis Meadows / David E. Kuhl (2009)
2010s	Shun-ichi Iwasaki / Peter Vitousek (2010) Ken Thompson / Dennis Ritchie / Tadamitsu Kishimoto / Toshio Hirano (2011) Janet Rowley / Brian Druker / Nicholas Lydon / Masato Sagawa (2012) C. Grant Willson / Jean Fréchet / John Frederick Grassle (2013) Yasuharu Suematsu / C. David Allis (2014) Yutaka Takahasi / Theodore Friedmann / Alain Fischer (2015) Hideo Hosono / Steven D. Tanksley (2016) Emmanuelle Charpentier / Jennifer Doudna / Adi Shamir (2017) Akira Yoshino / Max Dale Cooper / Jacques Miller (2018) Yoshio Okamoto / Rattan Lal (2019)
2020s	Robert G. Gallager / Svante Pääbo (2020) Martin A. Green / Bert Vogelstein / Robert A. Weinberg (2021) Katalin Karikó / Drew Weissman / Christopher Field (2022) Masataka Nakazawa / Kazuo Hagimoto / Gero Miesenböck / Karl Deisseroth (2023) Brian Hoskins / John Michael Wallace / Ronald M. Evans (2024)

Internet Hall of Fame

Pioneers

2012	Paul Baran Vint Cerf Danny Cohen Steve Crocker Donald Davies Elizabeth J. Feinler Charles Herzfeld Robert Kahn Peter T. Kirstein Leonard Kleinrock John Klensin Jon Postel Louis Pouzin Lawrence Roberts
2013	David Clark David Farber Howard Frank Kanchana Kanchanasut J. C. R. Licklider Bob Metcalfe Jun Murai Kees Neggers Nii Quaynor Glenn Ricart Robert Taylor Stephen Wolff Werner Zorn
2014	Douglas Engelbart Susan Estrada Frank Heart Dennis Jennings Rolf Nordhagen Radia Perlman

Global connectors

2012	Randy Bush Kilnam Chon Al Gore Nancy Hafkin Geoff Huston Brewster Kahle Daniel Karrenberg Toru Takahashi Tan Tin Wee
2013	Karen Banks Gihan Dias Anriette Esterhuysen Steve Goldstein Teus Hagen Ida Holz Qiheng Hu Haruhisa Ishida Barry Leiner George Sadowsky
2014	Dai Davies Demi Getschko Masaki Hirabaru Erik Huizer Steve Huter Abhaya Induruwa Dorcas Muthoni Mahabir Pun Srinivasan Ramani Michael Roberts Ben Segal Douglas Van Houweling
2017	Nabil Bukhalid Ira Fuchs Shigeki Goto Mike Jensen Ermanno Pietrosemoli Tadao Takahashi Florencio Utreras Wu Jianping

Innovators

2012	Mitchell Baker Tim Berners-Lee Robert Cailliau Van Jacobson Lawrence Landweber Paul Mockapetris Craig Newmark Ray Tomlinson Linus Torvalds Phil Zimmermann
2013	Marc Andreessen John Perry Barlow François Flückiger Stephen Kent Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder Henning Schulzrinne Richard Stallman Aaron Swartz Jimmy Wales
2014	Eric Allman Eric Bina Karlheinz Brandenburg John Cioffi Hualin Qian Paul Vixie
2017	Jaap Akkerhuis Yvonne Marie Andres Alan Emtage Ed Krol Tracy LaQuey Parker Craig Partridge

Inductees since 2019

2019	Adiel Akplogan Kimberly Claffy Douglas Comer Elise Gerich Larry Irving Dan Lynch Jean Armour Polly José Soriano Michael Stanton [pt] Klaas Wierenga Suguru Yamaguchi [ja]
2021	Carlos Afonso Rob Blokzijl Hans-Werner Braun [de] Frode Greisen Jan Gruntorad Saul Hahn Kim Hubbard Rafael Ibarra Xing Li Yngvar Lundh Dan Kaminsky DaeYoung Kim Kenneth Klingenstein Alejandro Pisanty Yakov Rekhter Philip Smith Pål Spilling Liane Tarouco [pt] Virginia Travers George Varghese Lixia Zhang
2023	Abhay Bhushan Laura Breeden Ivan Moura Campos Steve Cisler Peter Eckersley Hartmut Richard Glaser Simon S. Lam William Schrader Guy de Téramond

v t e Fellows of the Royal Society elected in 2001
Fellows	David Attwell David Baulcombe John Beddington Tim Berners-Lee Robert J. Birgeneau J. Richard Bond Hugh Bostock Keith Burnett Paul Callaghan Graham Collingridge James F. Crow Richard Dawkins Roger Ekins Henry Elderfield Anthony G. Evans Brian Eyre Peter Gluckman Charles Godfray Brigid Hogan John Hunt Frances Kirwan Shrinivas Kulkarni Andrew Leslie Michael Levitt Robin Lovell-Badge Paul Madden Mike Paterson Bruce Ponder Geoffrey Raisman Allan Sandage Dale Sanders David Schindler George M. Sheldrick Sheila Sherlock Thomas Simpson Adrian Smith Mandyam Veerambudi Srinivasan Ian Stewart Roger Tanner Marc Tessier-Lavigne Nicholas Tonks W. G. Unruh Bryan Webber Alex Wilkie
Honorary	Patrick Moore
Foreign	Alexei Abrikosov Alan Fowler Clara Franzini-Armstrong Ahmed Zewail

A. M. Turing Award laureates

Alan Perlis (1966)
Maurice Wilkes (1967)
Richard Hamming (1968)
Marvin Minsky (1969)
James H. Wilkinson (1970)
John McCarthy (1971)
Edsger W. Dijkstra (1972)
Charles Bachman (1973)
Donald Knuth (1974)
Allen Newell / Herbert A. Simon (1975)
Michael O. Rabin / Dana Scott (1976)
John Backus (1977)
Robert W. Floyd (1978)
Kenneth E. Iverson (1979)
Tony Hoare (1980)
Edgar F. Codd (1981)
Stephen Cook (1982)
Dennis Ritchie / Ken Thompson (1983)
Niklaus Wirth (1984)
Richard Karp (1985)
John Hopcroft / Robert Tarjan (1986)
John Cocke (1987)
Ivan Sutherland (1988)
William Kahan (1989)
Fernando J. Corbató (1990)
Robin Milner (1991)
Butler Lampson (1992)
Juris Hartmanis / Richard E. Stearns (1993)
Edward Feigenbaum / Raj Reddy (1994)
Manuel Blum (1995)
Amir Pnueli (1996)
Douglas Engelbart (1997)
Jim Gray (1998)
Fred Brooks (1999)
Andrew Yao (2000)
Ole-Johan Dahl / Kristen Nygaard (2001)
Leonard Adleman / Ron Rivest / Adi Shamir (2002)
Alan Kay (2003)
Vint Cerf / Bob Kahn (2004)
Peter Naur (2005)
Frances Allen (2006)
Edmund M. Clarke / E. Allen Emerson / Joseph Sifakis (2007)
Barbara Liskov (2008)
Charles P. Thacker (2009)
Leslie Valiant (2010)
Judea Pearl (2011)
Shafi Goldwasser / Silvio Micali (2012)
Leslie Lamport (2013)
Michael Stonebraker (2014)
Whitfield Diffie / Martin Hellman (2015)
Tim Berners-Lee (2016)
John L. Hennessy / David Patterson (2017)
Yoshua Bengio / Geoffrey Hinton / Yann LeCun (2018)
Ed Catmull / Pat Hanrahan (2019)
Alfred Aho / Jeffrey Ullman (2020)
Jack Dongarra (2021)
Robert Metcalfe (2022)
Avi Wigderson (2023)
Andrew Barto / Richard S. Sutton (2024)

Laureates of the Prince or Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research

Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research

1981: Alberto Sols
1982: Manuel Ballester
1983: Luis Antonio Santaló Sors
1984: Antonio Garcia-Bellido
1985: David Vázquez Martínez and Emilio Rosenblueth
1986: Antonio González González
1987: Jacinto Convit and Pablo Rudomín
1988: Manuel Cardona and Marcos Moshinsky
1989: Guido Münch
1990: Santiago Grisolía and Salvador Moncada
1991: Francisco Bolívar Zapata
1992: Federico García Moliner
1993: Amable Liñán
1994: Manuel Patarroyo
1995: Manuel Losada Villasante and Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad of Costa Rica
1996: Valentín Fuster
1997: Atapuerca research team
1998: Emilio Méndez Pérez and Pedro Miguel Echenique Landiríbar
1999: Ricardo Miledi and Enrique Moreno González
2000: Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier
2001: Craig Venter, John Sulston, Francis Collins, Hamilton Smith, and Jean Weissenbach
2002: Lawrence Roberts, Robert E. Kahn, Vinton Cerf, and Tim Berners-Lee
2003: Jane Goodall
2004: Judah Folkman, Tony Hunter, Joan Massagué, Bert Vogelstein, and Robert Weinberg
2005: Antonio Damasio
2006: Juan Ignacio Cirac
2007: Peter Lawrence and Ginés Morata
2008: Sumio Iijima, Shuji Nakamura, Robert Langer, George M. Whitesides, and Tobin Marks
2009: Martin Cooper and Raymond Tomlinson
2010: David Julius, Baruch Minke, and Linda Watkins
2011: Joseph Altman, Arturo Álvarez-Buylla, and Giacomo Rizzolatti
2012: Gregory Winter and Richard A. Lerner
2013: Peter Higgs, François Englert, and European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN
2014: Avelino Corma Canós, Mark E. Davis, and Galen D. Stucky

Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research

2015: Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna
2016: Hugh Herr
2017: Rainer Weiss, Kip S. Thorne, Barry C. Barish, and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration
2018: Svante Pääbo
2019: Joanne Chory and Sandra Myrna Díaz
2020: Yves Meyer, Ingrid Daubechies, Terence Tao, and Emmanuel Candès
2021: Katalin Karikó, Drew Weissman, Philip Felgner, Uğur Şahin, Özlem Türeci, Derrick Rossi, and Sarah Gilbert
2022: Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Demis Hassabis
2023: Jeffrey I. Gordon, Everett Peter Greenberg, and Bonnie Bassler
2024: Daniel J. Drucker, Jeffrey M. Friedman, Joel F. Habener, Jens Juul Holst, and Svetlana Mojsov

v t e Time 100: The Most Important People of the 20th Century
Leaders & revolutionaries	David Ben-Gurion Winston Churchill Mahatma Gandhi Mikhail Gorbachev Adolf Hitler Ho Chi Minh Pope John Paul II Ruhollah Khomeini Martin Luther King Jr. Vladimir Lenin Nelson Mandela Mao Zedong Ronald Reagan Eleanor Roosevelt Franklin D. Roosevelt Theodore Roosevelt Margaret Sanger Margaret Thatcher Unknown Tiananmen Square rebel Lech Wałęsa
Artists & entertainers	Louis Armstrong Lucille Ball The Beatles Marlon Brando Coco Chanel Charlie Chaplin Le Corbusier Bob Dylan T. S. Eliot Aretha Franklin Martha Graham Jim Henson James Joyce Pablo Picasso Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein Bart Simpson Frank Sinatra Steven Spielberg Igor Stravinsky Oprah Winfrey
Builders & titans	Stephen Bechtel Sr. Leo Burnett Willis Carrier Walt Disney Henry Ford Bill Gates Amadeo Giannini Ray Kroc Estée Lauder William Levitt Lucky Luciano Louis B. Mayer Charles E. Merrill Akio Morita Walter Reuther Pete Rozelle David Sarnoff Juan Trippe Sam Walton Thomas J. Watson Jr.
Scientists & thinkers	Leo Baekeland Tim Berners-Lee Rachel Carson Albert Einstein Philo Farnsworth Enrico Fermi Alexander Fleming Sigmund Freud Robert H. Goddard Kurt Gödel Edwin Hubble John Maynard Keynes Leakey family Jean Piaget Jonas Salk William Shockley Alan Turing Francis Crick & James Watson Ludwig Wittgenstein Wright brothers
Heroes & icons	Muhammad Ali The American G.I. Lady Diana Spencer Anne Frank Billy Graham Che Guevara Edmund Hillary & Tenzing Norgay Helen Keller Kennedy family Bruce Lee Charles Lindbergh Harvey Milk Marilyn Monroe Emmeline Pankhurst Rosa Parks Pelé Jackie Robinson Andrei Sakharov Mother Teresa Bill W.

Authority control databases
International	ISNI VIAF FAST WorldCat
National	Germany United States France BnF data Japan Italy Czech Republic Spain Netherlands Norway Latvia Chile Korea Sweden Poland Israel Catalonia
Academics	CiNii ORCID Association for Computing Machinery Scopus zbMATH DBLP
People	DDB
Other	IdRef SNAC ELMCIP