People
Some are famous, most aren't. Each one changed how I think about work, risk, or what one person can do. Short notes, written for myself.
22 people
Claude Shannon
Mathematician, Bell Labs
Turned information into something you could measure.
J.C.R. Licklider
Psychologist, ARPA
Imagined the internet and then funded the people who built it.
Douglas Engelbart
Engineer, SRI
Showed the world a personal computer twenty years early.
Gunpei Yokoi
Designer, Nintendo
Built great products out of old, cheap technology.
Leslie Lamport
Computer scientist
Worked out how computers can agree with each other.
Katalin Karikó
Biochemist
Kept working on mRNA when nobody wanted to fund it.
Norman Borlaug
Agronomist
Probably saved more lives than anyone you have heard of.
Verghese Kurien
Founder, Amul
Made India the largest milk producer in the world, through farmers.
E. Sreedharan
Engineer, Delhi Metro
Proved large public projects in India could finish on time.
Morris Chang
Founder, TSMC
Started the most important company most people never think about.
Stanislav Petrov
Soviet Air Defence officer
Decided the computer was wrong.
Ignaz Semmelweis
Physician, Vienna
Told doctors to wash their hands. They hated him for it.
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Mathematician
Did world class math as a clerk with almost no formal training.
Vikram Sarabhai
Founder, ISRO
Started a space program in a church in a fishing village.
Rosalind Franklin
Chemist, X-ray crystallographer
Took the photo that revealed the shape of DNA.
Nandan Nilekani
Co-founder, Infosys; Aadhaar
Left a tech company to build identity for a billion people.
Demis Hassabis
Co-founder, DeepMind
Uses games and AI as a route to doing science.
Steve Jobs
Co-founder, Apple
Knew what to leave out.
Bill Gates
Co-founder, Microsoft
Two careers, both with a very large footprint.
Satya Nadella
CEO, Microsoft
Changed a company by changing how it behaved.
Jensen Huang
Co-founder, Nvidia
Bet on one idea for twenty years until the world caught up.
Elon Musk
SpaceX, Tesla
Complicated, and that is the point.