Who developed the first algorithms?
Warren H. Wagner
He developed, in the early 1960s, the first algorithm for discerning phylogenetic relationships among species based upon their respective character states observed over a set of characters. This work was honored by James Farris and Arnold Kluge in their later appellation of related algorithms as "Wagner parsimony."
Stochastic approximation
The earliest, and prototypical, algorithms of this kind are the Robbins-Monro and Kiefer-Wolfowitz algorithms introduced respectively in 1951 and 1952.