Jackson Roykirk is the brilliant early twenty-first-century scientist who created the Nomad space probe, and for whom the damaged machine mistakes Captain Kirk in The Changeling.
Jackson Roykirk is an Earth scientist referred to, and shown in a computer record, in the Original Series episode The Changeling. In the early 2000s he designed Nomad, a thinking probe sent out to look for new life.
Nomad was thought lost. In fact it was damaged by a meteor and merged with an alien probe, Tan Ru, whose task was to sterilise soil samples. The hybrid emerged with great power and a confused mission to destroy whatever it judged imperfect.
When the machine hears the name Kirk it takes the captain for its maker, the Creator, and spares the Enterprise. Kirk exploits the error at the end, pointing out that he is not Roykirk and that Nomad has therefore made a mistake, which leads it to carry out its own sentence.