New: July 2025 – we can now send an A3 set completely free to computer science teachers, librarians and home educators in the UK. Please click the pink button below (or this link) to fill in the form and we’ll send you a set of posters. For those outside the UK please download your own copies below.
What does a Computer Scientist look like?
Great computer scientists can be female or male, of any colour, nationality or religion. They can be disabled, neurodiverse, LGBTQ+ … Look back through history and you will find every kind of person doing what we now call computer science!
What does a future great computer scientist look like? Just like you.
Download our posters about them and read their stories to see how they each changed the world.
If you want to be a computer scientist and make a difference you can!.
Our posters in this series are by illustrator (and computer scientist) Richard Butterworth.
Posters
Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī
Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi lived over 1200 years ago. He introduced Indian ideas of maths algorithms to western scholars. We get the word ‘algorithm’ from his name in Latin.
Gladys West
Gladys used complicated algorithms to calculate the shape of the earth. Her work is key to how satellite GPS works today.
Skip Ellis
Aged 15, Skip taught himself how computers work without even touching one. He wrote code that allows lots of people to work on one document at once. This is how Google Docs works today.
Download the poster.
Read our article about Skip Ellis.
Hedy Lamarr
As well as being a glamorous Hollywood actress, Hedy invented ‘frequency hopping’ which is used to make WiFi work today.
Louis Braille
Louis was blind from the age of 3. His ‘Braille’ invention allows millions of blind people to read. Braille was the first practical use of binary to write letters. Today all computers use binary.
There are lots more Computer Science Heroes out there, past, present and future (of course).
One could be you.
This blog and these posters are funded by EPSRC on grant EP/W033615/1.
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