Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Heafield Hamilton was born on August 17 1936 in Paoli, Indiana.  After receiving her undergraduate degree in mathematics, she married and taught math and French in public school while her husband completed college.

After the couple moved to Boston, Hamilton planed to enroll in graduate school, but obtained a job at MIT as a programmer for a professor doing meteorological prediction and statistical long-range weather forecasting.

Hamilton worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963 to do programming for another metrological professor. She wrote the computer code for the moon-bound spacecraft. In her study of software developed for these missions,

Hamilton tracked a variety of causes of software error – most notably interface errors. Hamilton popularized the term ‘software engineering’ and developed several aspects of today’s computing machines, such as the concept of asynchronous software, priority scheduling or end-to-end testing.
Margaret Hamilton

Chu Paul Ching-Wu

Chu Paul Ching was born on December 2, 1941, in Hunan, China but his parents were members of the Nationalist Party and the family fled to Taiwan in 1949 for political reasons.

After graduating in physics from Chen Kung University, Chu moved to America in 1963. He earned his MS from Fordham University, in Bronx, New York and completed his PhD in 1968 at the University of California, San Diego.

After spending two years working for the company AT & T, Chu entered academic life, first as assistant professor of physics at Cleveland State University and since 1979 as professor of physics at the University of Houston. He has held the Temple Chair since 1987.

He has been working on superconductivity since his days with Bernd T. Matthias at UCSD in the mid 196os. His other research interests are magnetism and ferroelectricity.

Chu is considered one of the most important superconductivity scientists for his 1987 discovery of a combination of materials that could conduct electricity at temperature high enough to allow for cheap, efficient energy production.
Chu Paul Ching-Wu 

Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988)

Known as the ‘Great Explainer,’ Richard Phillips Feynman was born in New York City in 1918 and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens.  As a child Feynman enjoyed tinkering and inventing such things as a burglar alarm for the house and a motor to rock his baby sister’s crib.

He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate when he was a seventeen years old. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1942. He later held an appointment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an assistant professor of physics.

Fearing that Germany would develop an atomic bomb before the United States, Feynman eventually signed on to Wilson’s isotron project to separate Uranium 235 from Uranium 238.

Feynman later was recruited by Julius Robert Oppenheimer to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos., New Mexico.

Feynman was known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the super-fluidity of super-cooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics.

For his contributions to the devolvement of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sino-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.

Feynman’s mathematical notation system for QED was accepted by the physics community over the systems developed by Schwinger and Tomonaga and his method of graphically drawing particle interaction, in what came to be dubbed Feynman diagrams.
Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988)

Robert Bakker – American Paleontologist

Robert Bakker was the first to claim that dinosaurs were warm blooded, colorful, quick and agile.

He was also the one who first proposed that birds were descended from dinosaurs. Such views, vigorously and frequently expressed, have made Bakker a controversial and well-known figure.

Robert Bakker was born in 1945. The son of an electrical engineer, Bakker graduated from high school in 1964 on the class honor roll and entered Yale University and Harvard where he completed his PhD in 1976.

After teaching for eight years at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, he moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1984 to work as an independent paleontologist.

Like his mentor John Ostrom, Bakker has helped reshape modern theories about dinosaurs, particular arguing in favor of the theory that some dinosaurs were warn-blooded; he has expanded and/or changed many conventional ideas about dinosaur behavior.

He is the author of many books, including Dinosaur Heresies, Raptor Red, Maximum Triceratops and Raptor Pack.

In his book, The Dinosaur Heresies, he discredits the meteorite theory of extinction and suggests that viruses caused the dinosaur’s demise.
Robert Bakker – American Paleontologist  

Baekeland, Leo Hendrick (1863 - 1944)

He was Belgian born US chemist who discovered Bakelite. Born in Ghent and educated at the University of Ghent, Baekeland gained his doctorate in 1884. He was appointed shortly afterwards to the chair of chemistry at Brugers University, but after a honey moon trip the USA chose in 1889 to leave Belgium permanently. Baekeland initially worked in the field of photography, inventing Velos, a special photographic paper that permitted pictures to be printed in artificial light. He opted to sell discovery to Eastman Kodak for $25,000. However, before he could begin the negotiation George Eastman offered him one million dollars, for the invention. With this totally unexpected fortune Baekeland retired to Yonkers, New York, to work in his private laboratory.

Here Baekeland dedicated himself to finding a substitute for shellac. As it takes 150000 insects and six months to produce one pound of shellac, there was clearly a great fortune to be made for anyone who could produce the substance artificially. Baekeland was aware, as indeed most of the chemist, of the sticky resin that forms when phenols and aldehydes are heated together; with no apparent use, it merely clogged up valuable equipment. He found that when subjected to prolonged heating under pressure, the resin turned out to have a surprising number of useful properties. It was hard, insoluble, could be machined, molded, colored , dyed and , though light, was remarkably strong. It was in fact, the first thermosetting plastic, name Bakelite in 1909.As president of Bakelite Corporation (1910-39), Baekeland saw that his product gained worldwide use in both industry and the home.