Introduction
Coding—the art and science of creating instructions for computers to follow—has evolved from an obscure technical skill to a fundamental literacy that powers our digital world. The history of coding spans from the theoretical foundations of computing to today’s diverse ecosystem of programming languages, platforms, frameworks, and development methodologies that enable everything from mobile apps to artificial intelligence systems.
Behind this evolution are visionary individuals who have created languages, built tools, established methodologies, founded influential companies, developed groundbreaking applications, and taught generations of programmers. Their contributions have not only advanced the technical capabilities of software but also democratized coding, making it more accessible to diverse practitioners around the world.
The following list highlights 100 influential figures who have shaped the landscape of coding through language design, software development, computer science education, open source advocacy, and technological innovation. From early pioneers who established the theoretical and practical foundations of programming to contemporary leaders expanding the boundaries of what code can accomplish and who can create it, these individuals collectively illustrate the rich history and promising future of a field that continues to transform our world.
Pioneering Figures and Early Innovators
1.Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)
Often credited as the world’s first computer programmer for her work on Charles Babbage’s proposed Analytical Engine in the 1840s. Lovelace wrote the first algorithm designed to be processed by a machine and envisioned that computers could go beyond mere calculation to manipulate symbols and even create music—insights that were remarkably prescient.
2.Alan Turing (1912-1954)
British mathematician and computer scientist who laid the theoretical foundations for computer science and artificial intelligence. Turing’s concept of the Universal Turing Machine established the fundamental principles of the modern computer, while his work breaking the Enigma code during World War II demonstrated the practical power of computational thinking.
3.Grace Hopper (1906-1992)
Computer scientist and U.S. Navy rear admiral who pioneered machine-independent programming languages and developed one of the first compilers. Hopper’s work on COBOL made programming more accessible by moving away from machine code toward human-readable language. She is also famously credited with popularizing the term “debugging” after removing an actual moth from a computer.
4.John Backus (1924-2007)
American computer scientist who led the team that created FORTRAN (Formula Translation), the first widely used high-level programming language. Backus’s innovation dramatically reduced the effort required to program computers, making coding more accessible to scientists and engineers without specialized computer knowledge.
5.Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011)
American computer scientist who created the C programming language and co-developed the Unix operating system with Ken Thompson. Ritchie’s work on C provided a language that was both powerful and portable across different hardware, while Unix established design philosophies that continue to influence operating systems today.
6.Ken Thompson
Computer scientist who co-created the Unix operating system, developed the B programming language (the predecessor to C), and co-invented the Go language. Thompson’s work on regular expressions and his creation of the ed text editor influenced many subsequent tools fundamental to programming.
7.Niklaus Wirth
Swiss computer scientist who designed several influential programming languages, including Pascal, Modula, and Oberon. Wirth’s languages emphasized clear syntax and strong typing, influencing generations of programming language design and computer science education.
8.John McCarthy (1927-2011)
Computer scientist who invented LISP, one of the oldest high-level programming languages still in use today and a foundation for artificial intelligence research. McCarthy’s work on LISP introduced many concepts central to programming, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, and dynamic typing.
9.Donald Knuth
Computer scientist and mathematician whose multi-volume work “The Art of Computer Programming” has been a definitive resource for algorithms and programming techniques since the 1960s. Knuth also created the TeX typesetting system and emphasized the importance of “literate programming”—writing code that is readable and understandable by humans.
10.Margaret Hamilton
Computer scientist who led the team that developed the onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo missions. Hamilton’s work pioneered rigorous software engineering practices and error detection techniques when reliability was absolutely critical. Her contributions helped establish software development as a discipline distinct from hardware engineering.
Programming Language Creators and System Designers
11.Bjarne Stroustrup
Danish computer scientist who created C++, extending the C language with object-oriented features. Stroustrup’s design philosophy of providing both high-level abstractions and low-level control has made C++ one of the most influential and widely used programming languages, powering everything from operating systems to video games.
12.James Gosling
Canadian computer scientist who created the Java programming language while at Sun Microsystems. Gosling’s “write once, run anywhere” approach revolutionized cross-platform development, while Java’s combination of object-oriented design, automatic memory management, and security features made it ideal for enterprise and web applications.
13.Guido van Rossum
Dutch programmer who created Python, a language known for its readability and versatility. Van Rossum’s design philosophy of emphasizing code readability and developer productivity has made Python one of the most popular languages for everything from web development to data science and artificial intelligence.
14.Larry Wall
American programmer who created the Perl programming language, designed for text manipulation and system administration. Wall’s pragmatic approach to language design, emphasizing that “there’s more than one way to do it,” made Perl a favorite for quick development of text-processing applications and early web development.
15.Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz)
Japanese programmer who created Ruby, a language designed for programmer happiness and productivity. Matsumoto’s focus on human-centered design influenced not only Ruby’s elegant syntax but also its vibrant community culture, exemplified in the “Ruby on Rails” framework that revolutionized web development.
16.Anders Hejlsberg
Danish software engineer who has designed multiple programming languages, including Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and TypeScript. Hejlsberg’s work at Microsoft has shaped modern enterprise and web development, particularly through C#'s role in the .NET ecosystem and TypeScript’s addition of static typing to JavaScript.
17.Brendan Eich
American programmer who created JavaScript in just 10 days while at Netscape in 1995. Despite its hasty origins, Eich’s creation became the standard language for client-side web programming and has evolved into a versatile language used across the entire web stack and beyond.
18.Rasmus Lerdorf
Danish-Canadian programmer who created PHP, originally as a set of tools to maintain his personal homepage. Lerdorf’s pragmatic approach resulted in a language that became the backbone of much of the early dynamic web, powering sites like Facebook in its early days and still used in the majority of websites today.
19.John Carmack
American game developer and programming virtuoso known for groundbreaking work on 3D graphics engines for games like Doom and Quake. Carmack’s innovative coding techniques pushed the boundaries of what was possible in real-time graphics and game physics, influencing both game development and graphics programming broadly.
20.Rob Pike
Programmer and author who co-created the Go programming language at Google with Ken Thompson and others. Pike’s experience with Unix and distributed systems informed Go’s design, which emphasizes simplicity, efficiency, and built-in support for concurrent programming—features that have made it popular for cloud services and microservices architectures.
21.Joe Armstrong (1950-2019)
Computer scientist who created the Erlang programming language, designed for building highly concurrent and distributed fault-tolerant systems. Armstrong’s work at Ericsson produced a language that powers telecommunications systems, messaging platforms like WhatsApp, and database systems that require extreme reliability.
22.Rich Hickey
Creator of the Clojure programming language, a modern Lisp dialect that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. Hickey’s emphasis on functional programming, immutability, and simplicity has influenced approaches to managing complexity in software development, particularly for data-intensive applications.
23.Martin Odersky
Computer scientist who created the Scala programming language, which combines object-oriented and functional programming paradigms. Odersky’s work has influenced the evolution of the Java platform and provided a powerful language for big data processing frameworks like Apache Spark.
24.Bram Moolenaar (1961-2023)
Dutch programmer who created Vim, one of the most popular and enduring text editors used by programmers. Moolenaar’s modal editing approach and extensible design have made Vim a staple development tool that has survived and thrived for decades despite countless newer alternatives.
25.Ryan Dahl
Creator of Node.js, which brought JavaScript to server-side programming, and more recently Deno, a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript. Dahl’s work has enabled JavaScript developers to work across the entire web stack using a single language, contributing to the explosion of JavaScript-based development.
Web and Internet Pioneers
26.Tim Berners-Lee
British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web by creating the first web browser, web server, and the foundational protocols and languages (HTTP, HTML) that power the web. Berners-Lee’s vision of an open, accessible platform for information sharing has transformed how humanity communicates, works, and accesses knowledge.
27.Linus Torvalds
Finnish-American software engineer who created the Linux kernel and the Git version control system. Torvalds’s work not only produced a free and open-source operating system kernel that powers everything from smartphones to supercomputers but also pioneered the distributed development model that enables global collaboration on complex software projects.
28.Marc Andreessen
Co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape. Andreessen’s work helped make the web accessible to non-technical users and introduced many features that became standard in web browsers, while his later role as a venture capitalist has shaped technology entrepreneurship.
29.Håkon Wium Lie
Norwegian web pioneer who proposed and co-created Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the styling language that separates content from presentation on the web. Lie’s work at CERN with Tim Berners-Lee established fundamental principles for web design that continue to evolve and influence how websites are built.
30.Douglas Crockford
American programmer who popularized the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data format and identified the “good parts” of JavaScript, helping developers use the language more effectively. Crockford’s advocacy for better JavaScript practices influenced how a generation of programmers approached the language.
31.John Resig
Creator of jQuery, a JavaScript library that simplified HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, and animation. Resig’s work dramatically improved cross-browser compatibility issues and accelerated web development during a critical period of the web’s evolution.
32.Addy Osmani
Engineering manager at Google and prolific open source contributor who has created numerous tools and libraries that have shaped modern web development. Osmani’s educational materials and performance optimization techniques have helped countless developers create better web applications.
33.Nicole Sullivan
Web developer who pioneered object-oriented CSS (OOCSS) and other methodologies for managing CSS at scale. Sullivan’s work addressed the challenges of maintaining large-scale websites and influenced subsequent approaches like BEM, SMACSS, and CSS-in-JS.
34.Brendan Eich
Beyond creating JavaScript (mentioned earlier), Eich co-founded the Mozilla project and led the development of the Firefox browser. Eich’s advocacy for web standards and open technologies has helped maintain the web as an open platform.
35.Mitchell Baker
Chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation and CEO of Mozilla Corporation. Baker’s leadership has been crucial in maintaining Firefox as an independent browser and advocating for an open web, providing a counterbalance to commercial interests that might otherwise dominate web standards and technologies.
Open Source Leaders and Community Builders
36.Richard Stallman
Founder of the Free Software Foundation and initiator of the GNU Project. Stallman’s philosophical and practical contributions established the free software movement, created the GPL license, and developed essential tools that form the foundation of many open source projects.
37.Linus Torvalds
Beyond creating Linux and Git (mentioned earlier), Torvalds established a collaborative development model that has become the template for thousands of open source projects. His practical approach to open source governance has balanced idealism with pragmatism.
38.Eric S. Raymond
American programmer and advocate who wrote “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” articulating the benefits of open source development methodologies. Raymond’s work helped bring open source into the mainstream business world and influenced how companies engage with open source communities.
39.Mitchell Baker
(Also mentioned in Web Pioneers) As leader of Mozilla, Baker has demonstrated how open source projects can be organized to remain sustainable while competing with commercial products. Mozilla’s structure has become a model for other large open source projects.
40.Mark Shuttleworth
Entrepreneur and founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux. Shuttleworth’s investments in making Linux accessible to regular users have dramatically expanded the reach of open source software and created one of the most popular Linux distributions.
41.Jim Zemlin
Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, which supports critical open source projects including the Linux kernel, Node.js, and Kubernetes. Zemlin has helped create sustainable funding models for open source development and built bridges between commercial interests and community projects.
42.Dries Buytaert
Creator of Drupal, the open source content management system, and founder of Acquia. Buytaert’s work not only produced widely-used software but also established governance models for balancing community contribution with commercial interests in open source projects.
43.Matt Mullenweg
Creator of WordPress, the content management system that powers over 40% of the web, and founder of Automattic. Mullenweg’s commitment to open source principles while building a successful business has demonstrated sustainable models for open source development.
44.Limor Fried (Lady Ada)
Founder of Adafruit Industries and influential figure in the open hardware movement. Fried’s work has made electronics and physical computing accessible to a wider audience, bridging the gap between software and hardware for many developers.
45.Kelsey Hightower
Google engineer and Kubernetes advocate whose tutorials, presentations, and open source contributions have been instrumental in the adoption of container orchestration technologies. Hightower’s accessible teaching style has helped countless developers understand complex cloud-native technologies.
Modern Software Development Leaders
46.Martin Fowler
Software architect and author known for his work on refactoring, design patterns, and agile methodologies. Fowler’s books and articles have codified best practices in software design and influenced how developers approach code quality and maintenance.
47.Kent Beck
Software engineer who created Extreme Programming (XP) and was one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto. Beck pioneered test-driven development (TDD) and other practices that have become foundational to modern software development methodologies.
48.Ward Cunningham
American programmer who invented the first wiki and contributed to the development of design patterns, extreme programming, and software refactoring. Cunningham’s emphasis on simplicity and collaboration has influenced both coding practices and knowledge sharing in software development.
49.Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob)
Software engineer and advocate for clean code practices. Martin’s books, including “Clean Code” and “The Clean Coder,” have shaped how a generation of programmers thinks about code quality, professionalism, and software craftsmanship.
50.Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber
Co-creators of the Scrum software development methodology, which has become one of the most widely used agile frameworks. Their work has transformed how teams organize and execute software projects, emphasizing iterative development and adaptation to change.
51.Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt
Authors of “The Pragmatic Programmer,” a influential book on software craftsmanship that has shaped how developers approach their profession. Thomas and Hunt articulated timeless principles of software development that have guided countless programmers.
52.Joel Spolsky
Software engineer, writer, and entrepreneur who co-founded Stack Overflow, the question-and-answer site that has become an essential resource for programmers worldwide. Spolsky’s blog “Joel on Software” influenced a generation of developers and startup founders.
53Jeff Atwood
Programmer, author, and co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Atwood’s work has created platforms that facilitate knowledge sharing among developers and his blog “Coding Horror” has explored the human aspects of programming.
54.DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson)
Creator of Ruby on Rails, the web application framework that pioneered convention over configuration and integrated practices like MVC architecture and database migrations. DHH’s opinionated approach to framework design dramatically increased developer productivity for web applications.
55.Kent C. Dodds
JavaScript engineer and educator known for his work on testing strategies and React. Dodds’s open source libraries, courses, and advocacy for accessible testing approaches have influenced how front-end developers ensure code quality.
Mobile and App Development Pioneers
56.Andy Rubin
Co-founder of Android Inc. and leader of Android development at Google after its acquisition. Rubin’s work created the foundation for the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, dramatically expanding the reach of mobile application development.
57.Chris Lattner
Creator of Swift, Apple’s programming language for iOS and macOS development, and LLVM, a collection of modular compiler technologies. Lattner’s work has modernized Apple’s development ecosystem and influenced compiler design broadly.
58.Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom
Co-founders of Instagram who built the original application in just eight weeks. Their lean approach to development and focus on a core photo-sharing experience created one of the world’s most popular mobile applications.
59.Brian Acton and Jan Koum
Co-founders of WhatsApp who built a messaging platform that scaled to billions of users with a remarkably small engineering team. Their focus on reliability and simplicity created one of the world’s most widely used communication tools.
60.Joe Hewitt
Developer who created the original Firefox Developer Tools and the first versions of the Facebook iOS app. Hewitt’s work on developer tooling and early mobile applications influenced how developers debug and build mobile experiences.
61.Sarah Allen
Co-creator of Flash video, which became the standard for web video before HTML5, and contributor to numerous open source projects. Allen’s work bridged creative and technical domains and later focused on increasing diversity in coding.
62.Mattt Thompson
Creator of numerous open source libraries for iOS development, including AFNetworking, and writer of NSHipster. Thompson’s libraries and educational content helped countless developers build better iOS applications.
63.Jake Wharton
Android developer known for creating influential libraries like ButterKnife and Timber. Wharton’s open source contributions have become standard tools for Android developers and his advocacy has shaped Android development practices.
64.Stephanie Shupe
Mobile developer and advocate who has contributed to frameworks and tools that simplify cross-platform development. Shupe’s educational content has helped bridge the gap between web and mobile development skills.
65.Rachel Laycock
Technology leader who has advanced mobile development practices and continuous delivery for mobile applications. Laycock’s work has helped organizations adopt modern engineering practices for mobile development.
AI, Data Science, and Specialized Domains
66.Andrew Ng
Co-founder of Coursera and former head of Google Brain and Baidu AI Group. Ng’s machine learning courses have educated millions of developers, while his technical leadership has advanced AI applications and democratized AI education.
67.Wes McKinney
Creator of pandas, the Python data analysis library used by millions of data scientists and analysts. McKinney’s work has been foundational to Python’s emergence as the leading language for data science and analytics.
68.Hadley Wickham
Creator of the tidyverse collection of R packages, including ggplot2, dplyr, and tidyr. Wickham’s consistent design philosophy has transformed how data scientists work with R, emphasizing readable, composable code for data manipulation and visualization.
69.Francois Chollet
Creator of Keras, the popular deep learning framework, and advocate for more thoughtful approaches to AI development. Chollet’s work has made neural networks more accessible to mainstream developers while also raising important questions about AI capabilities and limitations.
70.Fernando Pérez
Creator of IPython, which evolved into the Jupyter Notebook, an interactive computing environment used by millions of data scientists, researchers, and educators. Pérez’s work has transformed how people interact with code and data, making computation more accessible and reproducible.
71.Travis Oliphant
Creator of NumPy and co-founder of Anaconda. Oliphant’s work on scientific computing libraries for Python has been fundamental to the language’s adoption in data science, engineering, and scientific research.
72.Jessica McKellar
Software engineer, entrepreneur, and Python core developer who has contributed to both the technical and community aspects of the Python ecosystem. McKellar’s advocacy for diversity in coding has helped make the Python community more inclusive.
73.Tom Preston-Werner
Co-founder of GitHub and creator of Semantic Versioning and Jekyll. Preston-Werner’s work has improved how developers collaborate, manage dependencies, and create static websites.
74.Kelsey Hightower
(Also mentioned in Open Source Leaders) Beyond his Kubernetes work, Hightower has been influential in popularizing infrastructure as code and GitOps approaches to deployment, bridging development and operations.
75.Jennifer Widom
Computer scientist known for her contributions to database systems and data management. Widom’s research and educational materials have influenced how developers work with and think about data, particularly in large-scale applications.
Coding Educators and Advocates
76.Seymour Papert (1928-2016)
Mathematician, computer scientist, and educator who developed the Logo programming language to teach children mathematical thinking. Papert’s constructionist approach to learning through coding has influenced educational computing for generations.
77. Code.org Team (Hadi and Ali Partovi)
Founders of Code.org, which has introduced millions of students to computer science through initiatives like the Hour of Code. Their advocacy has expanded computer science education in schools worldwide and made coding more accessible to underrepresented groups.
78.Codecademy Founders (Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski)
Creators of the interactive coding platform that has taught programming skills to millions of people online. Codecademy’s approach to learning by doing has influenced how coding is taught in both formal and informal settings.
79.Quincy Larson
Founder of freeCodeCamp, a nonprofit organization that has created one of the most comprehensive free coding curricula available online. Larson’s platform has helped millions of people learn to code and transition into tech careers.
80.Barbara Oakley
Professor and creator of “Learning How to Learn,” one of the world’s most popular online courses. Oakley’s work on learning science has helped countless people develop more effective approaches to mastering coding skills.
81.Kathy Sierra
Programming instructor and author of the “Head First” book series, which revolutionized technical education through brain-friendly learning techniques. Sierra’s approach to teaching programming emphasized understanding how people learn and creating materials that work with cognitive processes.
82.Linda Liukas
Author of “Hello Ruby,” a children’s book series about computing concepts, and founder of Rails Girls. Liukas’s creative approach to teaching programming concepts to young children has expanded how we think about coding education.
83.Mark Guzdial
Computer science professor and researcher in computing education. Guzdial’s work has advanced our understanding of how people learn to program and developed approaches like media computation that make coding more engaging and relevant to diverse learners.
84.Charles Severance (Dr. Chuck)
Educator known for his popular Python courses on platforms like Coursera and his open teaching materials. Severance’s approachable teaching style has introduced programming to people with non-technical backgrounds worldwide.
85.Daniel Shiffman
Educator, author, and creator of “The Coding Train” YouTube channel. Shiffman’s enthusiastic teaching style and creative coding examples have made programming concepts accessible and engaging to a wide audience.
Diversity and Inclusion Advocates
86.Reshma Saujani
Founder of Girls Who Code, an organization dedicated to closing the gender gap in technology. Saujani’s advocacy has helped hundreds of thousands of girls learn coding skills and created a movement to increase women’s representation in tech.
87.Kimberly Bryant
Founder of Black Girls Code, which teaches programming to girls from underrepresented communities. Bryant’s organization has introduced coding to thousands of young Black and Latina girls, helping to diversify the pipeline of future technologists.
88.Tracy Chou
Software engineer and diversity advocate who pushed for transparency in tech company demographics. Chou’s data-driven approach to addressing diversity issues has influenced how the industry measures and approaches inclusion.
89.Ellen Spertus
Computer scientist, former Google engineer, and advocate for women in computing. Spertus’s research on gender in computer science and her mentorship of female engineers have addressed barriers to inclusion in the field.
90.Megan Smith
Former U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Google executive, and advocate for diversity in tech. Smith’s leadership has advanced initiatives to make coding more accessible to underrepresented groups and connected technology to social impact.
91.Karla Monterroso
CEO of Code2040, an organization focused on creating pathways to tech leadership for Black and Latinx people. Monterroso’s work addresses systemic barriers that prevent equitable representation in technology careers.
92.April Wensel
Founder of Compassionate Coding, a company that emphasizes the human side of software development. Wensel’s advocacy for emotional intelligence in tech has challenged toxic aspects of coding culture and promoted more inclusive environments.
93.Erica Joy Baker
Engineering leader and advocate for diversity in tech. Baker’s outspoken advocacy for pay equity and inclusive workplace practices has raised awareness of systemic issues affecting underrepresented groups in coding.
94.Scott Hanselman
Software developer and educator known for his blog, podcasts, and advocacy for inclusivity in tech. Hanselman’s amplification of diverse voices in coding has helped broaden representation in technical content and communities.
95.Anil Dash
Entrepreneur, blogger, and advocate for more humane, ethical technology. Dash’s writing on tech ethics and inclusion has influenced discussions about responsibility in coding and product development.
Emerging Innovators and Future Influencers
96.Kelsey Hightower
(Also mentioned in previous categories) Hightower’s teaching approach, combining deep technical knowledge with accessibility and humility, represents a model for technical leadership that continues to gain influence.
97.Cassidy Williams
Software engineer and educator known for making complex coding concepts accessible through social media and online content. Williams’s approach to tech communication and community building is shaping how knowledge is shared in the field.
98.Yihui Xie
Creator of several widely-used R packages including knitr and the RMarkdown ecosystem. Xie’s work on reproducible research tools has transformed how data scientists and researchers document and share their code and analyses.
99.Katie Bouman
Computer scientist known for her work on the algorithm that produced the first image of a black hole. Bouman’s visibility as a young woman leading groundbreaking computational work has inspired new generations of coders.
100.Sylvain Kerkour
Creator of Black Hat Rust and advocate for security-focused coding practices. Kerkour’s work represents the growing emphasis on integrating security considerations throughout the development process rather than treating it as a separate concern.
Conclusion
The individuals highlighted in this list represent diverse contributions to the field of coding, from creating the languages and tools that form the foundation of modern software development to expanding who has access to coding education and careers. Their collective impact has transformed coding from an esoteric technical skill into a global language that powers our digital world and enables innovation across virtually every domain of human endeavor.
Several themes emerge across these contributions. First, the most influential coding innovations often emphasize human factors—making development more intuitive, readable, and accessible. Second, community building has been as important as technical innovation, with open source collaboration models and knowledge-sharing platforms amplifying individual contributions. Third, the democratization of coding through educational initiatives and more accessible tools has expanded both who can code and what coding can accomplish.
As the field continues to evolve, new challenges and opportunities emerge. The integration of artificial intelligence into development tools is changing how code is written and debugged. The growing recognition of coding’s societal impact is raising important questions about ethics and responsibility. And ongoing efforts to make coding more accessible to people of all backgrounds promise to bring new perspectives and innovations to the field.
The most influential people in coding recognize that the field’s development is not merely a technical project but a deeply human endeavor that shapes how we communicate, work, learn, and solve problems in the digital age. Their diverse approaches and perspectives reflect the multifaceted nature of coding itself—part science, part craft, part art form—and its potential to both reflect and transform the world around us.
