>> The likes of Karp, Valiant, Cook, Blum, Vazirani, Papdimitriou, Micali, Goldwasser, Goldreich, Shamir, Rivest and etc.? I doubt these people know the inner w

>> The likes of Karp, Valiant, Cook, Blum, Vazirani, Papdimitriou, Micali, Goldwasser, Goldreich, Shamir, Rivest and etc.? I doubt these people know the inner workings of computers, but they have revolutionized our view of what it means to compute. >Um, why would you think that they don't understand the inner workings of computers? Yes, great point. I know of at least one person who seems to straddle both those worlds - Jon Bentley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley_(computer_scientis... He wrote Programming Pearls, More Programming Pearls, and Writing Efficient Programs. I own copies of either two or all three of those, and have read good amounts of the first two, and pretty close to the whole of the third (some years ago), which is out of print. A fantastic book (the first two are too). And the point here is that in the Efficient programs book, he goes into a lot of detail on performance improvement at the lower levels too, not just at the level of algorithms, though he covers that some too. And he has also invented algorithms (e.g. the Bentley–Ottmann algorithm). So he is an example that one can do/be both high-level and low-level. And of course, many more people do that, at a lower level of accomplishment (but still non-trivial), such as working with low-level languages (C, assembly) and doing perf tuning, as well as creating or improving algorithms and data structures for their work, high-level software design/architecture, etc.