Exemplars
Inspiring
- Jim Gilliam (like Ze Frank with a cause)
- Michael Phillips
- Alberti
- Lorenzo Medici
- Steve Jobs: an inspiration since I was 10
- Charles Marohn
- Connie Picciotto
- Laungi Bhuiya
- Katalin Karikó: gave up personal progress for science progress
- Oleksandr Kamyshin: businessperson who stepped up in crisis; I hope I would act similarly but moreso hope I never find out
Important
- Alan Turing: gave us general purpose computing
- Grace Hopper: added the abstraction layer of programming
- Douglas Engelbart: added that programs could be usable
- Andrew Carnegie: “…the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.”
- Thomas Jefferson: One of the most important sponsors of the liberty I enjoy today.
- Émile Baudot: inventor of digital communications
- Tommy Flowers: inventor of purely-electronic “programmable” computing in the face of skepticism
- Edward Snowden
- John Muir: defender of wilderness
- Pauli Murray: moved US towards civil rights
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg: defender of civil liberty and advocate for open dialogue and diversity
- Margaret Sanger
- Ida Craddock
- Ida Tarbell: heroine of the fourth estate
- Ida Wells: another heroine of the fourth estate
- Greta Thunberg: humanity’s conscience
Worth reading
- Zeynep Tufekci
- Daniel Dennett
- Danny Hillis
- Stephen Jay Gould
- Kurt Vonnegut
- H. L. Mencken
- George Lakoff: brings linguistic theory to laypeople in useful ways. Sometimes oversimplifies, especially about embodied cognition.
- Amanda Hess
- Gore Vidal