Thousands of attendees packed into a hockey arena in San Jose, Calif. yesterday (March 18) to hear from Jensen Huang kick off Nvidia’s annual developer conference, GTC. Dubbed the “Super Bowl of A.I.” by the CEO, the event’s audience also included the grandchildren of Vera Rubin, a famed astronomer for whom Nvidia’s upcoming GPU architecture is named.
Naming chips after prominent scientists has been a decades-long tradition at Nvidia. Following its upcoming Rubin GPUs, set for release in late 2026, the company plans to introduce a successor architecture named after theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, Huang revealed yesterday. The in-production Blackwell chip, unveiled at last year’s GTC, is named for mathematician David Blackwell.
Since 1998, Nvidia has drawn naming inspiration from computer scientists, mathematicians, astronomers and physicists since 1998. These scientific figures are such a core part of Nvidia’s culture that their faces appear on employee-only company merchandise labeled with the names of Nvidia’s “heroes.” Early architectures took cues from icons like Nikola Tesla and Johannes Kepler, while more recent product lines have spotlighted women in science, including GPUs named after Vera Rubin, Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace.
Here’s a closer look at some of the scientists who have been honored by the chipmaking giant over the past few years:
Richard Feynman
Contributions to quantum electrodynamics were among the many accomplishments of Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist who died in 1988 at age 69. He received the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for his efforts in the field.
Feynman additionally worked on the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II. Most of the American public, however, first became aware of the scientist when he served on a presidential commission investigating the 1986 explosion of the Challenger space shuttle.
Vera Rubin
Vera Rubin is most well-known for having provided evidence for the existence of dark matter in the universe. Working alongside astronomer Kent Ford in the 1960s, the duo came across the discovery after studying more than 60 galaxies.
A pioneering female astronomer, Rubin was the first woman to serve as scientist staffer at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and in 1993 was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She died in 2016 at age 88.
David Blackwell
Nvidia’s sought-after Blackwell chips were inspired by David Blackwell, a mathematician and statistician who died in 2010 at age 91. In addition to groundbreaking contributions to game theory, probability theory and information theory, Blackwell penned one of the first-ever textbooks on Bayesian statistics in 1969.
He also set milestones in the science community, becoming the first Black scholar to be admitted to the National Academy of Sciences in 1965. He was also the first Black professor to receive tenure at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the school’s faculty in the 1950s.
Grace Hopper
Nvidia’s Hopper chips, announced in 2022 and more commonly referred to as its H100 GPUs, took its name from computer scientist and naval officer Grace Hopper. She notably worked on Mark I, America’s first electromechanical computer, and the subsequent Mark II and Mark III computers during her time in the Navy. Appointed a Rear Admiral in the 1980s, she was the oldest officer on active duty when she retired in 1986.
After leaving the Navy, Hopper worked for the Digital Equipment Corporation until her death in 1992 at age 85. She received the National Medal of Technology from President George Bush the year prior for her contributions to computer programming languages.
Ada Lovelace
When it came to naming its Ada architecture three years ago, Nvidia went back to the 19th-century to draw inspiration from the 1800s mathematician Ada Lovelace. The daughter of British poet Lord Byron, Lovelace—who died in 1843 at age 36—is often recognized as the world’s first computer programmer.
Some of her most notable work occurred in 1843, when Lovelace added a set of notes to a translated academic article that laid out what many consider to be the first computer program. Her contributions were rediscovered in the late 1970s, leading the U.S. Department of Defense to name the Ada programming language after her.
