Berners-Lee named most influential over 150 years

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, OM, FRS, who holds a Chair of Computer Science in ECS, has been named by Intel as the most influential person in technology over the last 150 years.

Intel brought together a panel of experts including academics, journalists and independent third parties to vote on technology’s 45 most influential individuals, in order to celebrate its 45 nanometer (nm) next-generation family of quad-core processors.

In the judging session held in London last month, the panel’s full top ten comprised: 1.Tim Berners-Lee – Founder of the modern-day World Wide Web 2.Sergey Brin – Co-founder of Google 3.Larry Page – Co-founder of Google 4.Guglielmo Marconi – Inventor of the Radiotelegraph system 5.Jack Kilby – Inventor of the Integrated Circuit and Calculator 6.Gordon Moore – Co-founder of Intel 7.Alan Turing – played a major role in deciphering German Code in WWII 8.Robert Noyce – Co-founder of Intel 9.William Shockley – Co-Inventor of the Transistor 10.Don Estridge – Led the development of the IBM computer

‘It’s fitting that the people who have influenced the Internet turn up in the top three of the list,’ said Sean Maloney, executive vice president of Intel. ‘This emphasises the way the world is heading and that the Internet is our industry’s demand driver. As we saw at CES recently, people want an uncompromised web experience. Technologies such as Mobile Internet Devices and WiMAX promise to deliver just that.’

Sir Tim Berners-Lee was appointed to a Chair of Computer Science in ECS in November 2005. In 2006 he became one of the Founder Directors, along with Professor Wendy Hall and Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS, and Daniel J Weitzner of MIT, of the Web Science Research Initiative, a long-term collaborative research endeavour between ECS at the University of Southampton and CSAIL at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.