John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry create the first electronic non-programmable, digital computing device, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer, from 1937-42.
Monte Carlo simulation (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century) invented at Los Alamos by von Neumann, Ulam and Metropolis.
First hydro simulations occurred at Los Alamos.
George Dantzig introduces the simplex method (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century) in 1947.
Ulam and von Neumann introduce the notion of cellular automata.
Turing formulated the LU decomposition method.
First successful weather predictions on a computer occurred.
Hestenes, Stiefel, and Lanczos, all from the Institute for Numerical Analysis at the National Bureau of Standards, initiate the development of Krylov subspace iteration methods. Voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century.
A team led by Backus develops the FORTRAN compiler and programming language at IBM's research centre in San Jose, California. This sped the adoption of scientific programming, and is one of the oldest extant programming languages, as well as one of the most popular in science and engineering.
"Equations of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines" introduces the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm.
Fermi, Ulam and Pasta with help from Mary Tsingou, discover the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam problem.
Molecular dynamics invented by Bernie Alder and Wainwright
Householder invents his eponymous matrices and transformation method (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century).
John G.F. Francis and Vera Kublanovskaya invent QR factorization (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century).
First recorded use of the term "finite element method" by Ray Clough, to describe the methods of Courant, Hrenikoff and Zienkiewicz, among others. See also here.
Using computational investigations of the 3 body problem, Minovitch formulates the gravity assist method.
Edward Lorenz discovers the butterfly effect on a computer, attracting interest in chaos theory.
Molecular dynamics invented independently by Aneesur Rahman.
Fast Fourier Transform (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century) invented by Cooley and Tukey.
W Kohn instigates the development of density functional theory (with LJ Sham and P Hohenberg), for which he shares the Nobel Chemistry Prize (1998). This contribution is arguably the first Nobel given for a computer programme or computational technique.
Mandelbrot, from studies of the Fatou, Julia and Mandelbrot sets, coined and popularized the term 'fractal' to describe these structures' self-similarity.
Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken prove the four colour theorem, the first theorem to be proved by computer.
Fast multipole method (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century) invented by Rokhlin and Leslie Greengard.
In computational genomics and sequence analysis, the Human Genome Project, an endeavour to sequence the entire human genome, begins in 1990.
The appearance of the first research grids using volunteer computing - GIMPS (1996), distributed.net (1997) and Seti@Home (1999).
Kepler conjecture is almost all but certainly proved algorithmically by Thomas Hales in 1998.
The Human Genome Project completes a rough draft of human genome in 2000.
The BOINC architecture is launched in 2002.
The Human Genome Project completed in 2003.
Technology and Society
Tim Berners-Lee created Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the World Wide Web in 1989 and 1990 respectively, while working at CERN.
The world's first graphical internet browser, Mosaic released at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in 1993.
By (research/non-review) publications:
Los Alamos (7): Ulam et al. 1947; Metropolis & Ulam 1949; Richtmyer 1948; v. Neumann & Richtmyer 1950; Metropolis et al. 1953, Fermi et al. 1955; v. Neumann 1966.
NIST (4): Hestenes & Stiefel 1952, Stiefel 1952, and Lanczos 1950, 1952.
By (unique) authors/innovators:
IBM (2): Backus et al., Mandelbrot.
Los Alamos (11): Fermi; Metropolis (2 pub.s); Pasta; Richtmeyer (3 pub.s); Rosenbluth, A.W.; Rosenbluth, M.N.; Teller, A.H.; Teller, E.; Tsingou; Ulam (3 pub.s); v. Neumann (4 pub.s);
NIST(3): Hestenes, Lanczos(2 pub.s), Stiefel(2 pub.s).
