The Most Famous
COMPUTER SCIENTISTS from France
This page contains a list of the greatest French Computer Scientists. The pantheon dataset contains 201 Computer Scientists, 6 of which were born in France. This makes France the birth place of the 4th most number of Computer Scientists behind United Kingdom and Canada.
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 55.77, Luigi Federico Menabrea is the most famous French Computer Scientist. His biography has been translated into 30 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 53.33, Pierre Bézier is the 2nd most famous French Computer Scientist. His biography has been translated into 20 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 (1939 - )
With an HPI of 51.60, Jacques Vallée is the 3rd most famous French Computer Scientist. His biography has been translated into 19 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 (1960 - )
With an HPI of 47.01, Yann LeCun is the 4th most famous French Computer Scientist. His biography has been translated into 19 different languages.
Yann André LeCun ( lə-KUN, French: [ləkœ̃]; originally spelled Le Cun; born 8 July 1960) is a Turing Award winning 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 (CNN). 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. LeCun received the 2018 Turing Award, together with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, 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 (1950 - )
With an HPI of 43.83, 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 (1964 - )
With an HPI of 39.94, Yoshua Bengio is the 6th most famous French Computer Scientist. His biography has been translated into 19 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". As of May 2023, he has the highest h-index of any computer scientist.
Pantheon has 6 people classified as computer scientists born between 1809 and 1964. Of these 6, 4 (66.67%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living computer scientists include Jacques Vallée, Yann LeCun, and Bertrand Meyer. The most famous deceased computer scientists include Luigi Federico Menabrea and Pierre Bézier. As of April 2022, 1 new computer scientists have been added to Pantheon including Yoshua Bengio.
Living Computer Scientists
Go to all Rankings
Jacques Vallée
1939 - Present
HPI: 51.60
Yann LeCun
1960 - Present
HPI: 47.01
Bertrand Meyer
1950 - Present
HPI: 43.83
Yoshua Bengio
1964 - Present
HPI: 39.94
