Curated playlist
California Institute of Technology alumni
- John SchulmanJohn Schulman's first big project, a BattleBots robot, was never built. The reading it inspired led him to OpenAI.
- Frank BormanA stranger's telegram told Apollo 8's Frank Borman, "You saved 1968." He commanded the first crew to orbit the Moon.
- L. Sprague de CampL. Sprague de Camp turned the word extraterrestrial into a noun. He also coined E.T. in a 1939 magazine article.
- Gordon MooreMoore's law began as a ten-year forecast that Gordon Moore wrote for a magazine. He never meant it as a law.
- Harrison SchmittHarrison Schmitt was the only professional geologist to walk on the Moon. He flew on Apollo 17 in 1972.
- Roger NollEconomist Roger Noll has testified against the NCAA in several court cases. One was O'Bannon v. NCAA.
- David BrinAuthor David Brin won the Hugo Award for Best Novel twice with his Uplift Universe books.
- Edward FredkinEdward Fredkin never finished college, yet MIT made him a full professor in 1968. Marvin Minsky recruited him.
- Boris PodolskyPhysicist Boris Podolsky may have sold Soviet agents a public science law for $300.
- Harrison StormsAfter the Apollo 1 fire, NASA demanded that North American remove Harrison Storms. His boss chose to reassign him.
- Donald KnuthDonald Knuth, an American computer scientist born in 1938, pays $2.56 to anyone who finds a mistake in one of his books. The number is deliberate. As he explains it, 256 pennies make one hexadecimal dollar. A smaller reward of $0.32 goes…
- John McCarthy (computer scientist)John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in the summer of 1956. He also created the language Lisp.
- Virgil GriffithThe U.S. State Department denied Virgil Griffith the validation he needed to visit North Korea.
- Linus PaulingLinus Pauling left high school without a diploma. He later won two unshared Nobel Prizes, a first in history.
- Kip ThorneKip Thorne is an American astrophysicist whose life's work converged on a single announcement. On the 11th of February 2016, four physicists speaking for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration said that their instrument had recorded two black…