Curated playlist
California Institute of Technology alumni
- John SchulmanJohn Schulman was in seventh grade when he became fixated on BattleBots. The television program featured combat between remote-controlled robots, and it set off what he described as his first experience of self-directed learning. He read…
- Frank BormanFrank Borman received a telegram after returning from the Moon. It was from a stranger, and it said simply: "Thank you Apollo 8. You saved 1968." That single line captures what Borman's most famous mission meant to a country that had spent…
- L. Sprague de Camp"My own true name sounds more like a pseudonym than most pseudonyms do," L. Sprague de Camp said, explaining why he rarely used pen names. Over a career spanning 60 years, he wrote more than 100 books. By the 1930s and 1940s he had become…
- Gordon MooreGordon Earle Moore was born on the 3rd of January, 1929, in a world where the idea of a transistor had not yet been publicly demonstrated. By the time he died on the 24th of March, 2023, the prediction he had typed up for a magazine in…
- Harrison SchmittHarrison Hagan Schmitt stepped off the Moon's surface in December 1972 and boarded the Lunar Module just before his commander, Gene Cernan. That sequence made Schmitt the next-to-last human being to leave the Moon. Cernan died in 2017,…
- Roger NollRoger Noll was born on the 13th of March, 1940. He made his career as an economist who brought careful economic analysis to organized sport. His institutional home was Stanford University, where he eventually became emeritus professor of…
- David BrinDavid Brin's grandfather was drafted into the Russian army and sent to fight in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Brin was born on the 6th of October, 1950, in Glendale, California, to parents Selma and Herb Brin. Over the following…
- Edward FredkinEdward Fredkin bought chemistry supplies at age 10, made his own fireworks in Los Angeles, and got in trouble because fireworks were illegal. That detail captures something essential about the man. He was constitutionally incapable of…
- Boris PodolskyBoris Podolsky earned one of history's more remarkable endorsements in 1933. Albert Einstein called him "one of the most brilliant of the younger men" to have worked with Paul Dirac. Einstein made that observation in a letter to Abraham…
- Harrison StormsHarrison Allen Storms, Jr. was born on the 15th of July 1915, and by the time he died on the 11th of July 1992, just four days before his birthday, he had helped put human beings on the Moon. He was known inside North American Aviation…
- John McCarthy (computer scientist)John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in the summer of 1956, and spent the rest of his life trying to build exactly what that phrase promised. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 4th of September 1927, to an Irish…
- Virgil GriffithVirgil Griffith was arrested by the FBI on the 28th of November 2019. The agency accused him of giving North Korea information that could 'help North Korea launder money and evade sanctions.' At the time, Griffith held a research role at a…
- Linus PaulingLinus Carl Pauling stands alone in the history of Nobel Prizes. He is the only person ever to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, one for Chemistry in 1954 and one for Peace in 1962. Scientific American named him one of the twenty…