Timothy Berners-Lee

MIT / University of Oxford

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist at MIT and the University of Oxford who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN. He proposed and implemented the first HTTP server and client, defined the URL naming scheme, and created HTML — the three pillars of the Web. He made the Web freely available, choosing not to patent it, enabling its explosive global growth. Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to develop open web standards and has led the effort to keep the web open, interoperable, and accessible. He received the Turing Award in 2016 from the ACM. In recent years he has worked on a vision for the Semantic Web — a machine-readable layer of the web — and on Solid, a decentralized data platform co-developed through his startup Inrupt that aims to give users control over their own data. Berners-Lee has been recognized with numerous honors including a knighthood, and he continues to advocate for human rights online through the Web Foundation.