The American research and development (R&D) company Bell Labs is known for its many alumni who have won various awards, including the Nobel Prize and the ACM Turing Award.
List __ Nobel Prize __ Turing Award Image Alumni Notes Alistair E. Ritchie Bell Labs scientist and co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits on switching circuit theory. Father of Dennis M. Ritchie. Alfred Aho Advanced compiler theory and wrote the well known Dragon Book with Jeffrey Ullman on compiler design. Ali Javan Invented the gas laser in 1960. Arno Allan Penzias Discovered background radiation, with Robert W. Wilson, originating from the Big Bang and won the Nobel Prize in 1978 for the discovery. Amos E. Joel Jr. Was an American electrical engineer, known for several contributions and over seventy patents related to telecommunications switching systems. Joel worked at Bell Labs (1940–83) where he first undertook cryptology studies (collaboration with Claude Shannon), followed by studies on electronic switching system that resulted in the 1ESS switch (1948–60). He then headed the development of advanced telephone services (1961–68), which led to several patents, including one on Traffic Service Position System and a mechanism for handoff in cellular communication (1972). Received the * National Medal of Technology (1993). Inducted into the * National Inventors Hall of Fame (2008). Arthur Ashkin Has been considered the father of the topical field of optical tweezers, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018.Arthur HebardNoted for leading the discovery of superconductivity in Buckminsterfullerene in 1991.Arun N. Netravali2001 National Medal of Technology... Video signal interpolation using motion estimation Patent US4383272A Bishnu Atal Developed new speech processing and encoding algorithms, including fundamental work on linear prediction of speech and linear predictive coding (LPC), and the development of code-excited linear prediction (CELP) speech encoding, the basis for all speech communication codecs in mobile and Internet voice communications. Bjarne Stroustrup Was the head of Bell Labs Large-scale Programming Research department, from its creation until late 2002 and created the C++ programming language. Brian Kernighan Helped to create Unix, AWK, AMPL and authored along with Dennis Ritchie influential The C Programming Language book. Calvin Fuller A chemist that invented the practical silicon solar cell for telephone equipment with colleagues, Daryl Chapin and Gerald Pearson in 1954. Received the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2008. Claire F. Gmachl Developed novel designs for solid-state lasers leading to advances in the development of quantum cascade lasers. Claude Shannon Founded information theory with the publishing of A Mathematical Theory of Communication in 1948. He is perhaps equally well known for founding both digital computer and digital circuit design theory in 1937, when, as a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical, numerical relationship. Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis for national defense during World War II, including his basic work on codebreaking and secure telecommunications. For two months early in 1943, Shannon came into contact with the leading British cryptanalyst and mathematician Alan Turing. Shannon and Turing met at teatime in the cafeteria. Turing showed Shannon his 1936 paper that defined what is now known as the "Universal Turing machine"; this impressed Shannon, as many of its ideas complemented his own. Clinton Davisson Davisson and Lester Germer performed an experiment showing that electrons were diffracted at the surface of a crystal of nickel. This celebrated Davisson-Germer experiment confirmed the de Broglie hypothesis that particles of matter have a wave-like nature, which is a central tenet of quantum mechanics. Their observation of diffraction allowed the first measurement of a wavelength for electrons. He shared the Nobel Prize in 1937 with George Paget Thomson, who independently discovered electron diffraction at about the same time as Davisson. Clyde G. Bethea Corinna Cortes Head of Google Research, New York. Daniel Tsui Along with Robert Laughlin and Horst Störmer discovered new form of quantum fluid. David A. B. Miller Daryl Chapin An engineer that invented the practical silicon solar cell for telephone equipment with colleagues, Calvin Fuller and Gerald Pearson in 1954. Received the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2008. Dawon Kahng Invented the MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor) with Mohamed M. Atalla in 1959. It revolutionized the electronics industry, and is the most widely used semiconductor device in the world. Dennis Ritchie Created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system. Received the * National Medal of Technology (1998) with Ken Thompson, presented by President William Clinton. Donald Cox Received the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal (1993) Donald P. Ling Staff at BTL. In 1954, co-author of "Command Guidance for a Ballistic Missile". Vice president of Bell Labs and, in 1970, president of Bellcom, Inc. Retirement was 1971. Don McMillan Former engineer at Murray Hill location for the world's first 32-bit microprocessor. Douglas McIlroy Proposed Unix pipelines and developed several Unix tools. Pioneering researcher of macro processors, code reuse and component-based software engineering. Participated in the design of multiple influential programming languages, particularly PL/I, SNOBOL, ALTRAN, TMG and C++. Edward Lawry Norton Namesake of Norton's theorem. Elizabeth Bailey Worked in technical programming at Bell Laboratories from 1960 to 1972, before transferring to the economic research section from 1972 to 1977. Eric Betzig An American physicist who worked to develop the field of fluorescence microscopy and photoactivated localization microscopy. He was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy" along with Stefan Hell and fellow Cornell alumnus William E. Moerner. Eric Schmidt Did a complete re-write with Mike Lesk of Lex, a program to generate lexical analysers for the Unix computer operating system. Erna Schneider Hoover Invented the computerized telephone switching method. Esther M. Conwell Studied effects of high electric fields on electron transport in semiconductors, member of the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Evelyn Hu Pioneer in the fabrication of nanoscale electronic and photonic devices.