Frank McSherry

At Microsoft Research in 2006, McSherry wrote the paper on calibrating noise to a query's sensitivity together with Cynthia Dwork, Kobbi Nissim and Adam Smith; it is the foundation of differential privacy, and the four shared the 2017 Gödel Prize. In 2009 he released PINQ, a LINQ-style query language that does the privacy-budget bookkeeping automatically, so the analyst doesn't need to be a mathematician.

Systems work took over after that: Naiad and timely dataflow, then differential dataflow for incremental computation. His 2015 paper "Scalability! But at what COST?" showed a single-threaded laptop routinely beating clusters with hundreds of cores, which did not make him popular at distributed-systems conferences. He went on to co-found Materialize.