COMPUTER SCIENTISTS from France

Top 6

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary French Computer Scientists of all time. This list of famous French Computer Scientists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Luigi Federico Menabrea (1809 - 1896)

With an HPI of 56.94, Luigi Federico Menabrea is the most famous French Computer Scientist.  His biography has been translated into 32 different languages on wikipedia.

Luigi Federico Menabrea (4 September 1809 – 24 May 1896), later made 1st Count Menabrea and 1st Marquess of Valdora, was an Italian statesman, general, diplomat, and mathematician who served as the seventh prime minister of Italy from 1867 to 1869.

2. Pierre Bézier (1910 - 1999)

With an HPI of 53.20, Pierre Bézier is the 2nd most famous French Computer Scientist.  His biography has been translated into 22 different languages.

Pierre Étienne Bézier (1 September 1910 – 25 November 1999; [pjɛʁ etjɛn bezje]) was a French engineer and one of the founders of the fields of solid, geometric and physical modelling as well as in the field of representing curves, especially in computer-aided design and manufacturing systems. As an engineer at Renault, he became a leader in the transformation of design and manufacturing, through mathematics and computing tools, into computer-aided design and three-dimensional modeling. Bézier patented and popularized the Bézier curves and Bézier surfaces that are now used in most computer-aided design and computer graphics systems.

3. Jacques Vallée (b. 1939)

With an HPI of 50.88, Jacques Vallée is the 3rd most famous French Computer Scientist.  His biography has been translated into 20 different languages.

Jacques Fabrice Vallée (French: [ʒak fabʁis vale]; born September 24, 1939) is an Internet pioneer, computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, ufologist and astronomer currently residing in San Francisco, California and Paris, France. His scientific career began as a professional astronomer at the Paris Observatory. Vallée co-developed the first computerized map of Mars for NASA in 1963. He later worked on the network information center for the ARPANET, a precursor to the modern Internet, as a staff engineer of SRI International's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) under Douglas Engelbart. Vallée is also an important figure in the study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs). Vallée was first noted for his defense of the scientific legitimacy of the extraterrestrial hypothesis and later for promoting the interdimensional hypothesis.

4. Yann LeCun (b. 1960)

With an HPI of 50.26, Yann LeCun is the 4th most famous French Computer Scientist.  His biography has been translated into 29 different languages.

Yann André LeCun ( lə-KUN, French: [ləkœ̃]; originally spelled Le Cun; born 8 July 1960) is a French-American computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professor of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and Vice President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta. He is well known for his work on optical character recognition and computer vision using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). He is also one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology (together with Léon Bottou and Patrick Haffner). He co-developed the Lush programming language with Léon Bottou. In 2018, LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton, received the Turing Award for their work on deep learning. The three are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning".

5. Bertrand Meyer (b. 1950)

With an HPI of 44.24, Bertrand Meyer is the 5th most famous French Computer Scientist.  Her biography has been translated into 18 different languages.

Bertrand Meyer (; French: [mɛjɛʁ]; born 21 November 1950) is a French academic, author, and consultant in the field of computer languages. He created the Eiffel programming language and the concept of design by contract.

6. Yoshua Bengio (b. 1964)

With an HPI of 42.55, Yoshua Bengio is the 6th most famous French Computer Scientist.  His biography has been translated into 21 different languages.

Yoshua Bengio (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA). 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 work on deep learning. Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning". In 2024, TIME Magazine included Bengio in its yearly list of the world's 100 most influential people. As of August 2024, he is the world's most-cited computer scientist by h-index.