Georgy Adelson-Velsky, who invented AVL trees and bitboards for chess software, spoke no English. (See https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Georgy+Adelson-V

Georgy Adelson-Velsky, who invented AVL trees and bitboards for chess software, spoke no English. (See https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Georgy+Adelson-Velsky https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Georgy+Adelson-Velsk... for how he spoke no English.) I don't know about Evgenii Landis (the "L" in "AVL"), much less the other great Russian-speaking computer scientists from the 1960s (Levenshtein? Karatsuba? Brudno?) because it's really hard to find that information, and "at all" is a very low barrier. After all, I speak a few words of lots of languages, including "Good Morning" in Venda.