Pillars of Computer Science at Princeton in the 1930s
In the old Fine Hall, home in the 1930s of the Princeton Math department and the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study, were mathematicians whose students would form a significant part of the new fields of Computer Science and Operations Research.
Oswald Veblen, Chairman of the Princeton University Mathematics Department and first Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. His students include Alonzo Church (PhD 1927) and his PhD-descendents through Philip Franklin (Princeton PhD 1921) via Alan Perlis (Turing Award 1966) include David Parnas, Richard Lipton, Zohar Manna, Kai Li (now a Professor at Princeton), Jeannette Wing, and 500 other computer scientists. Veblen has more than 8000 PhD descendents in mathematics, computer science, and physics. He helped oversee the development of the pioneering ENIAC digital computer in the 1940s.
Alonzo Church, Professor of Mathematics, whose students include Alan Turing, Leon Henkin, Stephen Kleene, Michael Rabin (Turing Award 1976), Dana Scott (Turing Award 1976), Barkley Rosser, Martin Davis, and whose PhD descendents include 3000 other mathematicians and computer scientists, including Robert Constable, Edmund Clarke (Turing Award 2007), Allen Emerson (Turing Award 2007), David Harel, Tom Mitchell, and Les Valiant (Turing Award 2010).
Solomon Lefshetz, Professor of Mathematics, whose students include John McCarthy (Turing Award 1971), John Tukey, Ralph Gomory, Richard Bellman (inventor of dynamic programming), and whose 6181 PhD descendents include John Nash (Nobel Prize 1994), Marvin Minsky (Turing Award 1969), Manuel Blum (Turing Award 1995), Barbara Liskov (Turing Award 2008), Gerald Sussman, Shafi Goldwasser, Umesh and Vijay Vazirani, Persi Diaconis, Peter Buneman, and Philip Wadler.
Kurt Gödel, visitor to the Institute in 1933, 1934, 1935, and Professor at the Institute from 1940, had no students but had an enormous influence on the fields of mathematics and computer science.
John von Neumann, at Princeton University from 1930 and Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1933, had only a few students (including the pioneer in parallel computer architecture Donald Gillies), but had an enormous influence on the development of physics, mathematics, and computer science.