Top 25* Innovators

Geoffrey Hinton Along with Yann LeCun and

Yoshua Bengio, he’s one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence.

Brian Kernighan, developer of the AWK and AMPL programming languages and “nix pioneer, Rob Pike,

Go programmer and another “nix pioneer, and William Kahan, the “father of the floating point” who optimized Hewlett-Packard’s popular HP-35 calculator, are not household names, but they are considered legends in the computer science space. Tobias Lütke Founder of Shopify Inc., one of the few Canadian online success stories. Alexander Bell Inventor of the phone, enough said.

Sir Sandford Fleming Invented worldwide standard time.

Harriet Brooks The first Canadian female nuclear scientist was one of the first to discover radon and measure its atomic mass.

Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, regarded her as being next to Marie

Curie in her aptitude. Ernest Rutherford Admittedly, a bit of a cheat since he was British, but the father of nuclear physics made a lot of discoveries, particularly in radioactivity, while working at McGill University.

John McLennan Extracted helium from natural gas and then in 1923 successfully liquefied it, which allowed various things to be studied at the lowest temperature possible.

Eli Burton Franklin Built the first electron microscope in North America, along with

Cecil Hall, James Hillier and A.F. Prebus in Toronto during the late 1930s.

John Alexander “Jack” Hopps The “father of biomedical engineering in Canada” was a pioneer in making the artificial pacemaker and the founder of the Canadian Medical and Biological Engineering Society.

Sir Frederick Grant Banting and Charles

Best Co-discoverers of insulin and its therapeutic potential to keep diabetes in check.