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

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

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