nerd legends
Eadweard Muybridge (9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904) is known for his pioneering work in chronophotography of animal locomotion between 1877 and 1886, which used multiple cameras to capture the different positions in a stride, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting painted motion pictures from glass discs that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.[4] In the 1880s, he entered a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, occasionally capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate moments in time.​
Hedy Lamarr (November 9, 1914 – January 19, 2000) met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. She became a film star with her performance in Algiers (1938).[3]Her MGM films include Lady of the Tropics (1939), Boom Town (1940), H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), and White Cargo (1942). Her greatest success was as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949).[4] She also acted on television before the release of her final film, The Female Animal (1958). She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.[5] At the beginning of World War II, she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that use spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers.[6] Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s,[7] the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi.[8][9][10] ​
Harold "Doc" Edgerton (April 6, 1903 – January 4, 1990) began a lifelong association with photographer Gjon Mili, who used stroboscopic equipment, in particular, multiple studio electronic flash units, to produce strikingly beautiful photographs, many of which appeared in Life Magazine. When taking multiflash photographs this strobe light equipment could flash up to 120 times a second. Edgerton was a pioneer in using short duration electronic flash in photographing fast events photography, subsequently using the technique to capture images of balloons at different stages of their bursting, a bullet during its impact with an apple, or using multiflash to track the motion of a devil stick, for example.
Grace Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral.[1] One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and the landmark UNIVAC I computer system. She was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first linkers. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and the FLOW-MATIC programming language she created using this theory was later extended to create COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. She is also known to have coined the term, "Computer Bug," when she found a dead beetle inside one of her in-development computer systems.
Saul Bass (May 8, 1920 – April 25, 1996) ecame widely known in the film industry after creating the title sequence for Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). The subject of the film was a jazz musician's struggle to overcome his heroin addiction, a taboo subject in the mid-1950s. Bass decided to create an innovative title sequence to match the film's controversial subject. He chose the arm as the central image, as it is a strong image relating to heroin addiction. The titles featured an animated, white on black paper cut-out arm of a heroin addict. As he hoped, it caused a sensation. He also designed some of the most iconic corporate logos in North America, including the Geffen Records logo in 1980, the Hanna-Barbera "swirling star" logo in 1979, the sixth and final version of the Bell System logo in 1969, as well as AT&T Corporation's first globe logo in 1983 after the breakup of the Bell System. He also designed Continental Airlines' 1968 jet stream logo and United Airlines' 1974 tulip logo, which became some of the most recognized airline industry logos of the era.
Ray Dolby (January 18, 1933 – September 12, 2013) played a key role in the effort that led Ampex to unveil their prototype Quadruplex videotape recorder in April 1956 which soon entered production.[5] After Cambridge, Dolby acted as a technical advisor to the United Nations in India until 1965, when he returned to England, where he founded Dolby Laboratories in London with a staff of four. In that same year, 1965, he officially invented the Dolby noise-reduction system, a form of audio signal processing for analog tape recorders. His first U.S. patent was not filed until 1969, four years later. The system was first used by Decca Records in the UK.[7]
Thomas Robertson (born 14 October 1958), known by the stage name Thomas Dolby, is an English musician, producer, composer, entrepreneur and teacher.
"I sang in a choir when I was 10 or 11, and learned to sightread single lines, but other than that I don't have a formal education. I picked up the guitar initially, playing folk tunes—Dylan—then I graduated to piano when I got interested in jazz, listening to people like Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, and so on. The first electronic instruments started to become accessible in the mid-70s, and I got my hands on a kit built synthesizer and never looked back."
bios copied from Wikipedia
