Internet pioneer

Instead of a single "inventor", the Internet was developed by many people over many years. The following are some Internet pioneers who contributed to its early development. These include early theoretical foundations, specifying original protocols, and expansion beyond a research tool to wide deployment.

John von Neumann (1903–1957) was a founding figure of computing.Donald Knuth cites von Neumann as the inventor, in 1945, of the merge sort algorithm, in which the first and second halves of an array are each sorted recursively and then merged. Von Neumann wrote the sorting program for the EDVAC in ink, which was 23 pages long. He also worked on the philosophy of artificial intelligence with Alan Turing when the latter visited Princeton in the 1930s, and is said to have “pioneered the modern computer".

Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler) (1914–2000) was an Austrian and American film actress and inventor. At the beginning of World War II, Lamarr and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes, which used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Though the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are now incorporated into modern Wi-Fi, CDMA, and Bluetooth technology, and this work led to their being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Claude Shannon (1916–2001) called the "father of modern information theory", published "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in 1948. His paper gave a formal way of studying communication channels. It established fundamental limits on the efficiency of communication over noisy channels, and presented the challenge of finding families of codes to achieve capacity.

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