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Mark Hurd born on January 01, 1956 has been chief executive officer and president of HP and a member of the company’s board of directors since early 2005. In September 2006, he was named chairman of the board.

With the goal of establishing HP as the world’s leading technology company, Hurd has sharpened HP’s strategic focus and concentrated its R&D investments on three long-term growth opportunities: next-generation enterprise data center architecture and services; technologies for always connected, always personal mobile experiences; and a broad transition from analog to digital imaging and printing across the consumer, commercial and industrial markets.

At the same time, Hurd has improved HP’s operating efficiency and execution as well as its financial performance and customer focus. The result has been increasing growth and profitability, greater value for shareholders and customers, and a stronger competitive position in global IT markets. For the most recent four fiscal quarters, HP revenue totaled $104.3 billion.

Prior to joining HP, Hurd spent 25 years at NCR Corp., where he held a variety of management, operations, and sales and marketing roles that culminated in his two-year tenure as chief executive officer and president. His leadership was marked by successful efforts to improve operations, bolster the position of NCR’s product line and build a strong executive team.

Hurd is a member of the Technology CEO Council, a coalition of chairmen and chief executive officers of IT companies, which develops and advocates public policy positions on technology and trade issues.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1979 from Baylor University.

  

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Internet entrepreneur, computer scientist. Born in August 1973 in Moscow, Russia. The son of a Soviet mathematician economist, Brin and his family emigrated to the United States to escape Jewish persecution in 1979. After receiving his degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park, Brin entered Stanford University, where he met Larry Page. Both students were completing doctorates in computer science.

As a research project at Stanford University, Brin and Page created a search engine that listed results according to the popularity of the pages, after concluding that the most popular result would often be the most useful. They called the search engine Google after the mathematical term “Googol,” which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros, to reflect their mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the Web.

After raising $1 million from family, friends and other investors, the pair launched the company in 1998. Google has since become the world’s most popular search engine, receiving more than 200 million queries each day. Headquartered in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, Google held its initial public offering in August 2004, making Brin and Page billionaires. Brin continues to share the company’s day-to-day responsibilities with Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt.

  

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Internet entrepreneur, computer scientist. Born Lawrence Page on March 26, 1973 in East Lansing, Michigan. Page’s father Carl was a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence and his mother taught computer programming. After earning a bachelor of science degree in engineering from the University of Michigan, Page decided to concentrate on computer engineering at Stanford University, where he met Sergey Brin.

As a research project at Stanford University, Page and Brin created a search engine that listed results according to the popularity of the pages, after concluding that the most popular result would often be the most useful. They called the search engine Google after the mathematical term “Googol,” which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros, to reflect their mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the Web.

After raising $1 million from family, friends and other investors, the pair launched the company in 1998. Google has since become the world’s most popular search engine, receiving more than 200 million queries each day. Headquartered in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, Google held its initial public offering in August 2004, making Page and Brin billionaires. Page continues to share responsibility for Google’s day-to-day operations with Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt.

  

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Eric Emerson Schmidt, Ph.D is Chairman and CEO of Google Inc and a member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. From 1997 to 2001, he was CEO of Novell. In 2007, he was cited by “PC World” as #1 on the list of the 50 Most Important People on the Web, along with Google co-Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

  

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Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco to American Joanne Carole Schieble and Syrian Abdulfattah John Jandali, a graduate student who later became a political science professor. Steve Jobs is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Apple Inc., and was the CEO of Pixar Animation Studios until it was acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 2006. Jobs is currently the Walt Disney Company’s largest shareholder and a member of its Board of Directors. He is considered a leading figure in both the computer and entertainment industries. He is also widely credited as the inventor of the Macintosh, the iPod, the iTunes Store, and the iPhone, among other things

Steve Jobs is listed as Fortune Magazine’s Number One most powerful businessman of 2007 out of twenty-five other top businessmen.

Jobs’s history in business has contributed greatly to the myths of the quirky, individualistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, emphasizing the importance of design while understanding the crucial role aesthetics play in public appeal. His work driving forward the development of products that are both functional and elegant has earned him a devoted following.

Steve Jobs had a deep-seated interest in technology so he took up a job at Atari Inc. which was a leading manufacturer of video games. He struck a friendship with fellow designer Steve Wozniak and attended meetings of the “Homebrew Computer Club” with him. Wozniak and Jobs developed a system with a toy whistle available in the Cap’n Crunch cereal box to make it possible to make free long distance telephone calls. They called off the amateur venture after someone told them of the possible legal consequences.

Together with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Jobs helped popularize the personal computer in the late ’70s. In the early ’80s, still at Apple, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of the mouse-driven GUI. After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher education and business markets. NeXT’s subsequent 1997 buyout by Apple brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he has served as its chief executive officer since shortly after his return.

  

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Ramalinga Raju, is an Indian businessman, and a pioneer of the Information Technology industry in India.. He is the Chairman of Satyam Computer Services Ltd. It was founded in the late 1980′s after venturing earlier into other businesses such as construction and textiles.

Ramalinga Raju was born on September 16, 1954 in a family of farmers. He did his B. Com from Andhra Loyola College at Vijayawada and subsequently did his MBA from Ohio University, USA. Ramalinga Raju had a stint at Harvard too. He attended the Owner / President course at Harvard.

After returning to India in 1977, Ramalinga Raju moved away from the traditional agriculture business and set up a spinning and weaving mill named Sri Satyam. . Thereafter he shifted to the real estate business and started a construction company called Satyam Constructions. In 1987, Ramalinga Raju founded Satyam Computer Services along with one of his brothers-in-law, DVS Raju. The company went public in 1992. With the launch of Satyam Infoway (Sify) Satyam became one of the first to enter Indian internet service market. Today, Satyam has a global presence and serves 44 Fortune 500 and over 390 multinational corporations.

Now the company has rapidly developed and became a true multinational company with thousands of employees spread over multiple countries.

Ramalinga Raju has won several awards and honors. These include Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Services in 1999, Dataquest IT Man of the Year in 2000, and CNBC’s Asian Business Leader – Corporate Citizen of the Year award in 2002.

It took the Satyam founder more than two decades to achieve fame and less than two weeks to turn into a rogue figure, when on 7th Jan 2009, he accepted the fraud of billions of rupee in the company, done by him.

  

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Nandan Nilekani is the CEO and managing director of the Infosys. Along with Narayan Murthy, he was one of the co-founders of Infosys. He has served as a director on the company’s board since its inception in 1981. Before assuming the post of CEO in March 2002, Nandan Nilekani held the post of Managing Director, President and Chief Operating Officer.

Nandan Nilekani was born in Bangalore. His father Mohan Nilekani was a manager in Minerva Mills. Nandan Nilekani had his initial schooling in Bangalore. Due to his father’s transferable job Nandan moved to his uncle’s place at Dharwad at the age of 12. This taught Nandan Nilekani to be independent. In 1973, at the age of 18, Nandan Nilekani got admission in IIT Mumbai. The stint at IIT Mumbai transformed Nandan Nilekani from a small town boy to a confident mature man. The lessons he learnt here-meritocracy; the ability to work as part of a team; hard work; and the importance of giving back to the society-have stood him in good stead.

After graduating in electrical engineering from IIT Mumbai in 1978, Nandan Nilekani joined Patni Computers. Here he worked under Narayan Murthy. Three years later in 1981, Nandan Nilekani along with Narayan Murthy and five other co-founders founded Infosys. While Narayan Murthy stayed in India, Nandan Nilekani shifted to the US to take care of Infosys’ interests there. He was the company’s marketing face.

In 1980s and 90s Nandan Nilekani and his team worked hard to build Infosys. Today Infosys’ success story has become a legend in India’s corporate history. Today, Infosys has an employee strength of 58,000, annual revenue of $2 billion and $21 billion capitalization.

Nandan Nilekani is recipient of several honors and awards. In January 2006, Nandan became one of the youngest entrepreneurs to join 20 global leaders on the prestigious World Economic Forum (WEF) Foundation Board. He figures among one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, 2006. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious Joseph Schumpeter prize for innovative services in field of economy, economic sciences and politics. In 2006, Nandan Nilekani was conferred the Padma Bhushan, one of the highest civilian honors of India.

  

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C.V.Raman was a scientist in Physics, who won noble prize in 1930. His discovery of the ‘Raman Effect’ made a very distinctive contribution to Physics. He was knighted by
the British Government in 1929. He was also conferred the highest title of ‘Bharat Ratna’ in 1954.

Raman was born on 7th November,1888 at Ayyanpettai in Tamil Nadu. He had his education in Visakhapatanam and Madras. After getting top ranking in the Financial Civil Service Competitive Exam, he was appointed as Deputy Accountant General in Calcutta (Kolkutta). In 1917 he became the professor of Physics at the Calcutta University. After 15 years service at the Calcutta University, Raman shifted to Bangalore and became the Director of the Indian Institute of Science in 1933. In 1943 he founded ‘Raman Research Institute’, near Bangalore.

The ‘Raman Effect’ was a demonstration of the ‘Collision’ effect of light bullets (photons) passing through a transparent medium, whether solid, liquid or gaseous. Raman’s publications include ‘Molecular Diffraction of Light’, ‘Mechanical Theory of Bowed Strings’ and ‘Diffraction of X-ray’s', ‘Theories of Musical Instruments’ etc. Raman conducted pioneering research in musical acoustics, particularly on Tamboura, the well known Indian musical instrument.

  

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N.R. Narayana Murthy is an Indian Coroporate Leader, software engineer and the founder of Infosys.

Born into a south Indian family, in Mysore, Karnataka, India, on August 20, 1946, he graduated in electrical engineering from National Institute of Engineering,Mysore in 1967 and got his master’s degree from IIT Kanpur in 1969. He secured rank at both places.

He began his career with Patni Computer Systems at Pune. He met his to-be wife Sudha, who was working as a Research Associate with Tatas at Pune. Sudha Murthy, who by herself, has a brilliant Academic and career record, is from Mangalore, Karnataka. In 1981, he founded Infosys with six software professionals. He served as President of National Association of Software and Service Companies, India from 1992 to 1994.

Profile
Mr. Murthy served as CEO of Infosys for twenty years, handing over the reins to a fellow co-founder Nandan Nilekani in March 2002. In 1999, Infosys was listed on NASDAQ (INFY). He is the chairman of the governing body of both the Indian Institute of Information Technology – Bangalore, and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad . In addition, he is a member of the Board of Overseers of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Cornell University Board of Trustees, Singapore Management University Board of Trustees and the Board of Advisors for the William F. Achtmeyer Center for Global Leadership at the Tuck School of Business.

  

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Galileo Galilei (Pisa, February 15, 1564 – Arcetri, January 8, 1642), was a Tuscan astronomer, philosopher, and physicist who is closely associated with the scientific revolution. His achievements include improving the telescope, a variety of astronomical observations, the first law of motion, and supporting Copernicanism effectively. He has been referred to as the “father of modern astronomy,” as the “father of modern physics,” and as “father of science.” His experimental work is widely considered complementary to the writings of Francis Bacon in establishing the modern scientific method. Galileo’s career coincided with that of Johannes Kepler. The work of Galileo is considered to be a significant break from that of Aristotle. In addition, his conflict with the Roman Catholic Church is taken as a major early example of the conflict of authority and freedom of thought, particularly with science, in Western society.

Early career

Galileo was born in Pisa, Italy, as the son of Vincenzo Galilei, a mathematician and musician.

He attended the University of Pisa, but was forced to “drop out” for financial reasons. However, he was offered a position on its faculty in 1589 and taught mathematics. Soon after, he moved to the University of Padua, and served on its faculty teaching geometry, mechanics, and astronomy until 1610. During this time he explored science and made many landmark discoveries.

Experimental science

In the pantheon of the scientific revolution, Galileo takes a high position because of his pioneering use of quantitative experiments with results analyzed mathematically. There was no tradition of such methods in European thought at that time; the great experimentalist who immediately preceded Galileo, William Gilbert, did not use a quantitative approach. However, Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei, had performed experiments in which he discovered what may be the oldest known non-linear relation in physics, between the tension and the pitch of a stretched string. Galileo also contributed to the rejection of blind allegiance to authority (like the Church) or other thinkers (such as Aristotle) in matters of science and to the separation of science from philosophy or religion. These are the primary justifications for his description as “father of science.”

In the 20th century some authorities challenged the reality of Galileo’s experiments, in particular the distinguished French historian of science Alexandre Koyre. The experiments reported in Two New Sciences to determine the law of acceleration of falling bodies, for instance, required accurate measurements of time, which appeared to be impossible with the technology of the 1600s. According to Koyre, the law was arrived at deductively, and the experiments were merely illustrative thought experiments.

Later research, however, has validated the experiments. The experiments on falling bodies (actually rolling balls) were replicated using the methods described by Galileo (Settle, 1961), and the precision of the results was consistent with Galileo’s report. Later research into Galileo’s unpublished working papers from as early as 1604 clearly showed the reality of the experiments and even indicated the particular results that led to the time-squared law (Drake, 1973).

Astronomy

Although the popular idea of Galileo inventing the telescope is inaccurate, he was one of the first people to use the telescope to observe the sky. Based on sketchy descriptions of telescopes invented in the Netherlands in 1608, Galileo made one with about 8x magnification, and then made improved models up to about 20x. On August 25, 1609, he demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers. His work on the device also made for a profitable sideline with merchants who found it useful for their shipping businesses. He published his initial telescopic astronomical observations in March 1610 in a short treatise entitled Sidereus Nuncius (Sidereal Messenger).

On January 7, 1610 Galileo discovered three of Jupiter’s four largest satellites (moons): Io, Europa, and Callisto. Ganymede he discovered four nights later. He determined that these moons were orbiting the planet since they would occasionally disappear; something he attributed to their movement behind Jupiter. He made additional observations of them in 1620. Later astronomers overruled Galileo’s naming of these objects, changing his Medicean stars to Galilean satellites. The demonstration that a planet had smaller planets orbiting it was problematic for the orderly, comprehensive picture of the geocentric model of the universe, in which everything circled around the Earth.

Galileo noted that Venus exhibited a full set of phases like the Moon. The heliocentric model of the solar system developed by Copernicus predicted that all phases would be visible since the orbit of Venus around the Sun would cause its illuminated hemisphere to face the Earth when it was on the opposite side of the Sun and to face away from the Earth when it was on the Earth-side of the Sun.

rast, the geocentric model of Ptolemy predicted that only crescent and new phases would be seen, since Venus was thought to remain between the Sun and Earth during its orbit around the Earth. Galileo’s observation of the phases of Venus proved that Venus orbited the Sun and lent support to (but did not prove) the heliocentric model.

Galileo was one of the first Europeans to observe sunspots, although there is evidence that Chinese astronomers had done so before. The very existence of sunspots showed another difficulty with the perfection of the heavens as assumed in the older philosophy. And the annual variations in their motions, first noticed by Francesco Sizzi, presented great difficulties for either the geocentric system or that of Tycho Brahe. A dispute over priority in the discovery of sunspots led to a long and bitter feud with Christoph Scheiner; in fact, there can be little doubt that both of them were beaten by David Fabricius and his son Johannes.

He was the first to report lunar mountains and craters, whose existence he deduced from the patterns of light and shadow on the Moon’s surface. He even estimated the mountains’ heights from these observations. This led him to the conclusion that the Moon was “rough and uneven, and just like the surface of the Earth itself”, and not a perfect sphere as Aristotle had claimed.

Galileo observed the Milky Way, previously believed to be nebulous, and found it to be a multitude of stars, packed so densely that they appeared to be clouds from Earth. He also located many other stars too distant to be visible with the naked eye.

Galileo observed the planet Neptune in 1611, but took no particular notice of it; it appears in his notebooks as one of many unremarkable dim stars.

Physics

Galileo’s theoretical and experimental work on the motions of bodies, along with the largely independent work of Kepler and Rene Descartes, was a precursor of the Classical mechanics developed by Sir Isaac Newton. He was a pioneer, at least in the European tradition, in performing rigorous experiments and insisting on a mathematical description of the laws of nature.

One of the most famous stories about Galileo is that he dropped balls of different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their velocity of descent was independent of their mass (excluding the limited effect of air resistance). This was contrary to what Aristotle had taught: that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones, in direct proportion to weight. Though the story of the tower first appeared in a biography by Galileo’s pupil Vincenzo Viviani, it is not now generally accepted as true. However, Galileo did perform experiments involving rolling balls down inclined planes, which proved the same thing: falling or rolling objects (rolling is a slower version of falling) are accelerated independently of their mass.

He determined the correct mathematical law for acceleration: the total distance covered, starting from rest, is proportional to the square of the time (This law is regarded as a predecessor to the many later scientific laws expressed in mathematical form.). He also concluded that objects retain their velocity unless a force —often friction— acts upon them, refuting the accepted Aristotelian hypothesis that objects “naturally” slow down and stop unless a force acts upon them. This principle was incorporated into Newton’s laws of motion (1st law).

Galileo also noted that a pendulum’s swings always take the same amount of time, independently of the amplitude. While Galileo believed this equality of period to be exact, it is only an approximation appropriate to small amplitudes. It is good enough to regulate a clock, however, as Galileo may have been the first to realize. (See Technology below)

In the early 1600s, Galileo and an assistant tried to measure the speed of light.

Good on different hilltops, each holding a shuttered lantern. Galileo would open his shutter, and, as soon as his assistant saw the flash, he would open his shutter. At a distance of less than a mile, Galileo could detect no delay in the round-trip time greater than when he and the assistant were only a few yards apart. While he could reach no conclusion on whether light propagated instantaneously, he recognized that the distance between the hilltops was perhaps too small for a good measurement.

Galileo is lesser known for, yet still credited with being one of the first to understand sound frequency. After scraping a chisel at different speeds, he linked the pitch of sound to the spacing of the chisel’s skips (frequency).

In his 1632 Dialogue Galileo presented a physical theory to account for tides, based on the motion of the Earth. If correct, this would have been a strong argument for the reality of the Earth’s motion. (The original title for the book, in fact, described it as a dialogue on the tides; the reference to tides was removed by order of the Inquisition.) His theory gave the first insight into the importance of the shapes of ocean basins in the size and timing of tides; he correctly accounted, for instance, for the negligible tides halfway along the Adriatic Sea compared to those at the ends. As a general account of the cause of tides, however, his theory was a failure.

Mathematics

While Galileo’s application of mathematics to experimental physics was innovative, his mathematical methods were the standard ones of the day. The analyses and proofs relied heavily on the Eudoxian theory of proportion, as set forth in the fifth book of Euclid’s Elements. This theory had become available only a century before, thanks to accurate translations by Tartaglia and others; but by the end of Galileo’s life it was being superseded by the algebraic methods of Descartes, which a modern finds incomparably easier to follow.

Galileo produced one piece of original and even prophetic work in mathematics: Galileo’s paradox, which shows that there are as many perfect squares as there are whole numbers, even though most numbers are not perfect squares. Such seeming contradictions were brought under control 250 years later in the work of Georg Cantor.

Technology

Galileo made a few contributions to what we now call technology as distinct from pure physics, and suggested others. This is not the same distinction as made by Aristotle, who would have considered all Galileo’s physics as techne or useful knowledge, as opposed to episteme, or philosophical investigation into the causes of things.

In 1595-1598, Galileo devised and improved a “Geometric and Military Compass” suitable for use by gunners and surveyors. This expanded on earlier instruments designed by Niccolo Tartaglia and Guidobaldo del Monte. For gunners, it offered, in addition to a new and safer way of elevating cannons accurately, a way of quickly computing the charge of gunpowder for cannonballs of different sizes and materials. As a geometric instrument, it enabled the construction of any regular polygon, computation of the area of any polygon or circular sector, and a variety of other calculations.

About 1606-1607 (or possibly earlier), Galileo made a thermometer, using the expansion and contraction of air in a bulb to move water in an attached tube.

In 1609, Galileo was among the first to use a refracting telescope as an instrument to observe stars, planets or moons.

In 1610, he used a telescope as a compound microscope, and he made improved microscopes in 1623 and after.

This appears to be the first clearly documented use of the compound microscope.

In 1612, having determined the orbital periods of Jupiter’s satellites, Galileo proposed that with sufficiently accurate knowledge of their orbits one could use their positions as a universal clock, and this would make possible the determination of longitude. He worked on this problem from time to time during the remainder of his life; but the practical problems were severe. The method was first successfully applied by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1681 and was later used extensively for land surveys; for navigation, the first practical method was the chronometer of John Harrison.

In his last year, when totally blind, he designed an escapement mechanism for a pendulum clock. The first fully operational pendulum clock was made by Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s.

He created sketches of various inventions, such as a candle and mirror combination to reflect light throughout a building, an automatic tomato picker, a pocket comb that doubled as an eating utensil, and what appears to be a ballpoint pen.

Church controversy

Galileo was a practicing Catholic, yet his writings on Copernican heliocentrism disturbed some in the Catholic Church who believed in a geocentric model of the solar system. They argued that heliocentrism was in direct contradiction of the Bible, at least as interpreted by the church fathers, and the highly revered ancient writings of Aristotle and Plato (especially among the Dominican order, facilitators of the Inquisition).

The geocentric model was generally accepted at the time for several reasons. By the time of the controversy, the Catholic Church had largely abandoned the Ptolemaic model for the Tychonian model in which the Earth was at the center of the Universe, the Sun revolved around the Earth and the other planets revolved around the Sun. This model is geometrically equivalent to the Copernican model and had the extra advantage that it predicted no parallax of the stars, an effect that was impossible to detect with the instruments of the time. In the view of Tycho and many others, this model explained the observable data of the time better than the geocentric model did. (That inference is valid, however, only on the assumption that no very small effect had been missed: that the instruments of the time were absolutely perfect, or that the Universe could not be much larger than was generally believed at the time. As to the latter, belief in the large, possibly infinite, size of the Universe was part of the heretical beliefs for which Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake in 1600.)

An understanding of the controversies, if it is even possible, requires attention not only to the politics of religious organizations but to those of academic philosophy. Before Galileo had trouble with the Jesuits and before the Dominican friar Caccini denounced him from the pulpit, his employer heard him accused of contradicting Scripture by a professor of philosophy, Cosimo Boscaglia, who was neither a theologian nor a priest. The first to defend Galileo was a Benedictine abbot, Benedetto Castelli, who was also a professor of mathematics and a former student of Galileo’s. It was this exchange that led Galileo to write the Letter to Grand Duchess Christina. (Castelli remained Galileo’s friend, visiting him at Arcetri near the end of Galileo’s life, after months of effort to get permission from the Inquisition to do so.)

However, real power lay with the Church, and Galileo’s arguments were most fiercely fought on the religious level. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century historian Andrew Dickson White wrote from an anti-clerical perspective:
The war became more and more bitter. The Dominican Father Caccini preached a sermon from the text, “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?” and this wretched pun upon the great astronomer’s name ushered in sharper weapons; for, before Caccini ended, he insisted that “geometry is of the devil,” and that “mathematicians should be banished as the authors of all heresies.” The Church authorities gave Caccini promotion.
Father Lorini proved that Galileo’s doctrine was not only heretical but “atheistic,” and besought the Inquisition to intervene.

hop of Fiesole screamed in rage against the Copernican system, publicly insulted Galileo, and denounced him to the Grand-Duke. The Archbishop of Pisa secretly sought to entrap Galileo and deliver him to the Inquisition at Rome. The Archbishop of Florence solemnly condemned the new doctrines as unscriptural; and Paul V, while petting Galileo, and inviting him as the greatest astronomer of the world to visit Rome, was secretly moving the Archbishop of Pisa to pick up evidence against the astronomer.

But by far the most terrible champion who now appeared was Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, one of the greatest theologians the world has known. He was earnest, sincere, and learned, but insisted on making science conform to Scripture. The weapons which men of Bellarmin’s stamp used were purely theological. They held up before the world the dreadful consequences which must result to Christian theology were the heavenly bodies proved to revolve about the Sun and not about the Earth.

Their most tremendous dogmatic engine was the statement that “his pretended discovery vitiates the whole Christian plan of salvation.” Father Lecazre declared “it casts suspicion on the doctrine of the incarnation.” Others declared, “It upsets the whole basis of theology. If the Earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it can not be that any such great things have been done specially for it as the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam? How can they trace back their origin to Noah’s ark? How can they have been redeemed by the Saviour?” Nor was this argument confined to the theologians of the Roman Church; Melanchthon, Protestant as he was, had already used it in his attacks on Copernicus and his school. (White, 1898; online text)

In 1616, the Inquisition warned Galileo not to hold or defend the hypothesis asserted in Copernicus’s On the Revolutions, though it has been debated whether he was admonished not to “teach in any way” the heliocentric theory. When Galileo was tried in 1633, the Inquisition was proceeding on the premise that he had been ordered not to teach it at all, based on a paper in the records from 1616; but Galileo produced a letter from Cardinal Bellarmine that showed only the “hold or defend” order.

  

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Jonas Salk (October 28, 1914 – June 23, 1995) is the discoverer/inventor of the eponymous Salk vaccine (see polio vaccine). Salk was born in New York City. He spent his career as a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Later in his career, Salk devoted much of his energy to developing an AIDS vaccine.

His vaccine was one of the first successful attempts at immunization against a virus, specifically the Poliomyelitis virus. The vaccine provides the recipient with immunity against Polio, and was seminal in the near eradication of a once widely-feared disease. Salk used a "killed" virus technique which required the patient to be injected with the vaccine. The patient would develop immunity to the live disease due to the body’s earlier reaction to the killed virus. By contrast, Albert Sabin developed a "live" vaccine which was released in 1961, and which could be taken orally.

Unlike some scientists who sought wealth or fame accompanying their innovations, Salk stated "’Who owns my polio vaccine? The people! Could you patent the sun?". The Salk Institute in La Jolla, California was named in Jonas Salk’s honor.

  

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Galileo Galilei (Pisa, February 15, 1564 – Arcetri, January 8, 1642), was a Tuscan astronomer, philosopher, and physicist who is closely associated with the scientific revolution. His achievements include improving the telescope, a variety of astronomical observations, the first law of motion, and supporting Copernicanism effectively. He has been referred to as the “father of modern astronomy,” as the “father of modern physics,” and as “father of science.” His experimental work is widely considered complementary to the writings of Francis Bacon in establishing the modern scientific method. Galileo’s career coincided with that of Johannes Kepler. The work of Galileo is considered to be a significant break from that of Aristotle. In addition, his conflict with the Roman Catholic Church is taken as a major early example of the conflict of authority and freedom of thought, particularly with science, in Western society.

Early career

Galileo was born in Pisa, Italy, as the son of Vincenzo Galilei, a mathematician and musician.

He attended the University of Pisa, but was forced to “drop out” for financial reasons. However, he was offered a position on its faculty in 1589 and taught mathematics. Soon after, he moved to the University of Padua, and served on its faculty teaching geometry, mechanics, and astronomy until 1610. During this time he explored science and made many landmark discoveries.

Experimental science

In the pantheon of the scientific revolution, Galileo takes a high position because of his pioneering use of quantitative experiments with results analyzed mathematically. There was no tradition of such methods in European thought at that time; the great experimentalist who immediately preceded Galileo, William Gilbert, did not use a quantitative approach. However, Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei, had performed experiments in which he discovered what may be the oldest known non-linear relation in physics, between the tension and the pitch of a stretched string. Galileo also contributed to the rejection of blind allegiance to authority (like the Church) or other thinkers (such as Aristotle) in matters of science and to the separation of science from philosophy or religion. These are the primary justifications for his description as “father of science.”

In the 20th century some authorities challenged the reality of Galileo’s experiments, in particular the distinguished French historian of science Alexandre Koyre. The experiments reported in Two New Sciences to determine the law of acceleration of falling bodies, for instance, required accurate measurements of time, which appeared to be impossible with the technology of the 1600s. According to Koyre, the law was arrived at deductively, and the experiments were merely illustrative thought experiments.

Later research, however, has validated the experiments. The experiments on falling bodies (actually rolling balls) were replicated using the methods described by Galileo (Settle, 1961), and the precision of the results was consistent with Galileo’s report. Later research into Galileo’s unpublished working papers from as early as 1604 clearly showed the reality of the experiments and even indicated the particular results that led to the time-squared law (Drake, 1973).

Astronomy

Although the popular idea of Galileo inventing the telescope is inaccurate, he was one of the first people to use the telescope to observe the sky. Based on sketchy descriptions of telescopes invented in the Netherlands in 1608, Galileo made one with about 8x magnification, and then made improved models up to about 20x. On August 25, 1609, he demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers. His work on the device also made for a profitable sideline with merchants who found it useful for their shipping businesses. He published his initial telescopic astronomical observations in March 1610 in a short treatise entitled Sidereus Nuncius (Sidereal Messenger).

On January 7, 1610 Galileo discovered three of Jupiter’s four largest satellites (moons): Io, Europa, and Callisto. Ganymede he discovered four nights later. He determined that these moons were orbiting the planet since they would occasionally disappear; something he attributed to their movement behind Jupiter. He made additional observations of them in 1620. Later astronomers overruled Galileo’s naming of these objects, changing his Medicean stars to Galilean satellites. The demonstration that a planet had smaller planets orbiting it was problematic for the orderly, comprehensive picture of the geocentric model of the universe, in which everything circled around the Earth.

Galileo noted that Venus exhibited a full set of phases like the Moon. The heliocentric model of the solar system developed by Copernicus predicted that all phases would be visible since the orbit of Venus around the Sun would cause its illuminated hemisphere to face the Earth when it was on the opposite side of the Sun and to face away from the Earth when it was on the Earth-side of the Sun.

rast, the geocentric model of Ptolemy predicted that only crescent and new phases would be seen, since Venus was thought to remain between the Sun and Earth during its orbit around the Earth. Galileo’s observation of the phases of Venus proved that Venus orbited the Sun and lent support to (but did not prove) the heliocentric model.

Galileo was one of the first Europeans to observe sunspots, although there is evidence that Chinese astronomers had done so before. The very existence of sunspots showed another difficulty with the perfection of the heavens as assumed in the older philosophy. And the annual variations in their motions, first noticed by Francesco Sizzi, presented great difficulties for either the geocentric system or that of Tycho Brahe. A dispute over priority in the discovery of sunspots led to a long and bitter feud with Christoph Scheiner; in fact, there can be little doubt that both of them were beaten by David Fabricius and his son Johannes.

He was the first to report lunar mountains and craters, whose existence he deduced from the patterns of light and shadow on the Moon’s surface. He even estimated the mountains’ heights from these observations. This led him to the conclusion that the Moon was “rough and uneven, and just like the surface of the Earth itself”, and not a perfect sphere as Aristotle had claimed.

Galileo observed the Milky Way, previously believed to be nebulous, and found it to be a multitude of stars, packed so densely that they appeared to be clouds from Earth. He also located many other stars too distant to be visible with the naked eye.

Galileo observed the planet Neptune in 1611, but took no particular notice of it; it appears in his notebooks as one of many unremarkable dim stars.

Physics

Galileo’s theoretical and experimental work on the motions of bodies, along with the largely independent work of Kepler and Rene Descartes, was a precursor of the Classical mechanics developed by Sir Isaac Newton. He was a pioneer, at least in the European tradition, in performing rigorous experiments and insisting on a mathematical description of the laws of nature.

One of the most famous stories about Galileo is that he dropped balls of different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their velocity of descent was independent of their mass (excluding the limited effect of air resistance). This was contrary to what Aristotle had taught: that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones, in direct proportion to weight. Though the story of the tower first appeared in a biography by Galileo’s pupil Vincenzo Viviani, it is not now generally accepted as true. However, Galileo did perform experiments involving rolling balls down inclined planes, which proved the same thing: falling or rolling objects (rolling is a slower version of falling) are accelerated independently of their mass.

He determined the correct mathematical law for acceleration: the total distance covered, starting from rest, is proportional to the square of the time (This law is regarded as a predecessor to the many later scientific laws expressed in mathematical form.). He also concluded that objects retain their velocity unless a force -often friction – acts upon them, refuting the accepted Aristotelian hypothesis that objects “naturally” slow down and stop unless a force acts upon them. This principle was incorporated into Newton’s laws of motion (1st law).

Galileo also noted that a pendulum’s swings always take the same amount of time, independently of the amplitude. While Galileo believed this equality of period to be exact, it is only an approximation appropriate to small amplitudes. It is good enough to regulate a clock, however, as Galileo may have been the first to realize. (See Technology below)

In the early 1600s, Galileo and an assistant tried to measure the speed of light.

Good on different hilltops, each holding a shuttered lantern. Galileo would open his shutter, and, as soon as his assistant saw the flash, he would open his shutter. At a distance of less than a mile, Galileo could detect no delay in the round-trip time greater than when he and the assistant were only a few yards apart. While he could reach no conclusion on whether light propagated instantaneously, he recognized that the distance between the hilltops was perhaps too small for a good measurement.

Galileo is lesser known for, yet still credited with being one of the first to understand sound frequency. After scraping a chisel at different speeds, he linked the pitch of sound to the spacing of the chisel’s skips (frequency).

In his 1632 Dialogue Galileo presented a physical theory to account for tides, based on the motion of the Earth. If correct, this would have been a strong argument for the reality of the Earth’s motion. (The original title for the book, in fact, described it as a dialogue on the tides; the reference to tides was removed by order of the Inquisition.) His theory gave the first insight into the importance of the shapes of ocean basins in the size and timing of tides; he correctly accounted, for instance, for the negligible tides halfway along the Adriatic Sea compared to those at the ends. As a general account of the cause of tides, however, his theory was a failure.

Mathematics

While Galileo’s application of mathematics to experimental physics was innovative, his mathematical methods were the standard ones of the day. The analyses and proofs relied heavily on the Eudoxian theory of proportion, as set forth in the fifth book of Euclid’s Elements. This theory had become available only a century before, thanks to accurate translations by Tartaglia and others; but by the end of Galileo’s life it was being superseded by the algebraic methods of Descartes, which a modern finds incomparably easier to follow.

Galileo produced one piece of original and even prophetic work in mathematics: Galileo’s paradox, which shows that there are as many perfect squares as there are whole numbers, even though most numbers are not perfect squares. Such seeming contradictions were brought under control 250 years later in the work of Georg Cantor.

Technology

Galileo made a few contributions to what we now call technology as distinct from pure physics, and suggested others. This is not the same distinction as made by Aristotle, who would have considered all Galileo’s physics as techne or useful knowledge, as opposed to episteme, or philosophical investigation into the causes of things.

In 1595-1598, Galileo devised and improved a “Geometric and Military Compass” suitable for use by gunners and surveyors. This expanded on earlier instruments designed by Niccolo Tartaglia and Guidobaldo del Monte. For gunners, it offered, in addition to a new and safer way of elevating cannons accurately, a way of quickly computing the charge of gunpowder for cannonballs of different sizes and materials. As a geometric instrument, it enabled the construction of any regular polygon, computation of the area of any polygon or circular sector, and a variety of other calculations.

About 1606-1607 (or possibly earlier), Galileo made a thermometer, using the expansion and contraction of air in a bulb to move water in an attached tube.

In 1609, Galileo was among the first to use a refracting telescope as an instrument to observe stars, planets or moons.

In 1610, he used a telescope as a compound microscope, and he made improved microscopes in 1623 and after.

This appears to be the first clearly documented use of the compound microscope.

In 1612, having determined the orbital periods of Jupiter’s satellites, Galileo proposed that with sufficiently accurate knowledge of their orbits one could use their positions as a universal clock, and this would make possible the determination of longitude. He worked on this problem from time to time during the remainder of his life; but the practical problems were severe. The method was first successfully applied by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1681 and was later used extensively for land surveys; for navigation, the first practical method was the chronometer of John Harrison.

In his last year, when totally blind, he designed an escapement mechanism for a pendulum clock. The first fully operational pendulum clock was made by Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s.

He created sketches of various inventions, such as a candle and mirror combination to reflect light throughout a building, an automatic tomato picker, a pocket comb that doubled as an eating utensil, and what appears to be a ballpoint pen.

Church controversy

Galileo was a practicing Catholic, yet his writings on Copernican heliocentrism disturbed some in the Catholic Church who believed in a geocentric model of the solar system. They argued that heliocentrism was in direct contradiction of the Bible, at least as interpreted by the church fathers, and the highly revered ancient writings of Aristotle and Plato (especially among the Dominican order, facilitators of the Inquisition).

The geocentric model was generally accepted at the time for several reasons. By the time of the controversy, the Catholic Church had largely abandoned the Ptolemaic model for the Tychonian model in which the Earth was at the center of the Universe, the Sun revolved around the Earth and the other planets revolved around the Sun. This model is geometrically equivalent to the Copernican model and had the extra advantage that it predicted no parallax of the stars, an effect that was impossible to detect with the instruments of the time. In the view of Tycho and many others, this model explained the observable data of the time better than the geocentric model did. (That inference is valid, however, only on the assumption that no very small effect had been missed: that the instruments of the time were absolutely perfect, or that the Universe could not be much larger than was generally believed at the time. As to the latter, belief in the large, possibly infinite, size of the Universe was part of the heretical beliefs for which Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake in 1600.)

An understanding of the controversies, if it is even possible, requires attention not only to the politics of religious organizations but to those of academic philosophy. Before Galileo had trouble with the Jesuits and before the Dominican friar Caccini denounced him from the pulpit, his employer heard him accused of contradicting Scripture by a professor of philosophy, Cosimo Boscaglia, who was neither a theologian nor a priest. The first to defend Galileo was a Benedictine abbot, Benedetto Castelli, who was also a professor of mathematics and a former student of Galileo’s. It was this exchange that led Galileo to write the Letter to Grand Duchess Christina. (Castelli remained Galileo’s friend, visiting him at Arcetri near the end of Galileo’s life, after months of effort to get permission from the Inquisition to do so.)

However, real power lay with the Church, and Galileo’s arguments were most fiercely fought on the religious level. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century historian Andrew Dickson White wrote from an anti-clerical perspective:
The war became more and more bitter. The Dominican Father Caccini preached a sermon from the text, “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?” and this wretched pun upon the great astronomer’s name ushered in sharper weapons; for, before Caccini ended, he insisted that “geometry is of the devil,” and that “mathematicians should be banished as the authors of all heresies.” The Church authorities gave Caccini promotion.
Father Lorini proved that Galileo’s doctrine was not only heretical but “atheistic,” and besought the Inquisition to intervene.

hop of Fiesole screamed in rage against the Copernican system, publicly insulted Galileo, and denounced him to the Grand-Duke. The Archbishop of Pisa secretly sought to entrap Galileo and deliver him to the Inquisition at Rome. The Archbishop of Florence solemnly condemned the new doctrines as unscriptural; and Paul V, while petting Galileo, and inviting him as the greatest astronomer of the world to visit Rome, was secretly moving the Archbishop of Pisa to pick up evidence against the astronomer.

But by far the most terrible champion who now appeared was Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, one of the greatest theologians the world has known. He was earnest, sincere, and learned, but insisted on making science conform to Scripture. The weapons which men of Bellarmin’s stamp used were purely theological. They held up before the world the dreadful consequences which must result to Christian theology were the heavenly bodies proved to revolve about the Sun and not about the Earth.

Their most tremendous dogmatic engine was the statement that “his pretended discovery vitiates the whole Christian plan of salvation.” Father Lecazre declared “it casts suspicion on the doctrine of the incarnation.” Others declared, “It upsets the whole basis of theology. If the Earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it can not be that any such great things have been done specially for it as the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam? How can they trace back their origin to Noah’s ark? How can they have been redeemed by the Saviour?” Nor was this argument confined to the theologians of the Roman Church; Melanchthon, Protestant as he was, had already used it in his attacks on Copernicus and his school. (White, 1898; online text)

In 1616, the Inquisition warned Galileo not to hold or defend the hypothesis asserted in Copernicus’s On the Revolutions, though it has been debated whether he was admonished not to “teach in any way” the heliocentric theory. When Galileo was tried in 1633, the Inquisition was proceeding on the premise that he had been ordered not to teach it at all, based on a paper in the records from 1616; but Galileo produced a letter from Cardinal Bellarmine that showed only the “hold or defend” order.

  

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Douglas Noel Adams (March 11, 1952 – May 11, 2001) – also known as Bop Ad or Bob after his illegible signature, or by his initials DNA – was a British comic radio dramatist and author, most notably of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (HHGG or H2G2).

Education & early works

Adams was born in Cambridge and educated at Brentwood School, Essex where he became friends with Griff Rhys Jones. Adams attended St John’s College, Cambridge, and worked with Rhys Jones in the Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club. In 1974, Adams received a BA (and later, an MA) in English literature.

An autobiography from an early edition of one of the HHGG novels provided the following description of his early career: After graduation he spent several years contributing material to radio and television shows as well as writing, performing, and sometimes directing stage revues in London, Cambridge and at the Edinburgh Fringe. He has also worked at various times as a hospital porter, barn builder, chicken shed cleaner, bodyguard, radio producer and script editor of Doctor Who.

Some of his early work appeared on BBC2 (TV) in 1974, in an edited version of the Footlights Revue from Cambridge, that year. A version of the same review performed live in London’s West End led to Adams being “discovered” by Graham Chapman.

The two formed a brief writing partnership and Adams earned a writing credit in one episode (episode 45: “Party Political Broadcast on Behalf of the Liberal Party”) of Monty Python’s Flying Circus; in the sketch a man who had been stabbed by a nurse arrives at his doctor’s office bleeding profusely from the stomach, when the doctor makes him fill out numerous senseless forms before he can administer treatment (a joke he later incorporated into the Vogons’ obsession with paperwork). Douglas also (supposedly) has two “blink and you miss them” appearances in the fourth series of Monty Python. Adams and Chapman also attempted a few non-Python projects, including Out of the Trees.

Some of his early radio work includes sketches for The Burkiss Way in 1977 and the News Huddlines.

In 1979 Douglas Adams and John Lloyd together wrote the script for two half hour episodes of Doctor Snuggles, one of them called “The remarkable fidgety river”. John Lloyd was also co-author of two episodes from the original “Hitchhiker” radio series (Fit the Fifth and Fit the Sixth (aka Episodes Five and Six – see explanation below)), as well as The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

According to Adams, the idea for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy occurred to him while he lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria (though he joked that the BBC would instead claim it was Spain because they could spell it), gazing at the stars. He had been wandering the countryside while carrying a book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe when he ran into a town where, as he humorously describes, everyone was “deaf”, “dumb”, and could only speak languages that he couldn’t speak. After wandering around and drinking for a while, he went to sleep in the middle of a field and was inspired by his inability to communicate with the townspeople. He later said that due to his constantly retelling this story of inspiration, he no longer had any memory of the moment of inspiration itself, and only remembered his retellings of that moment. A postscript to MJ Simpson’s biography of Adams, Hitchhiker, provides evidence that the story was in fact a fabrication and that Adams had conceived the idea some time before his trip around Europe.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was originally a six-part (each part titled a “Fit” after Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark) radio series broadcast in the UK by BBC Radio 4 in 1978. Following the success of the show, there was a ‘Christmas special’ broadcast at the end of 1978, and a second series which was broadcast one per night, during the week of the 21 January 1980. The radio programme served as the basis for the first two novels of what eventually became a “trilogy in five parts”. It was also the basis for a six-part BBC television series in 1981.

Adams was never a prolific writer and usually had to be forced by others to do any writing. This included being locked in a hotel suite with his editor for three weeks to ensure that So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish was completed. He has been quoted as saying, “I love deadlines, especially the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”

The books formed the basis for other adaptations, such as three-part comic book adaptations for each of the first three books, an interactive text-adventure computer game, and a photo illustrated edition, published in 1994. This latter edition featured a 42 puzzle designed by Adams, which was later incorporated into paperback covers of all five “Hitchhiker’s” novels.

Plans to make HHGG into a major motion picture were in the works for more than twenty years, and were finally freed from development hell in late September 2003. Although Austin Powers director Jay Roach was at one time signed on to the project, the Hammer and Tongs duo, Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, got the responsibility. Key to the go-ahead was a rewrite of the screenplay by Karey Kirkpatrick, who had earlier worked on Chicken Run. Shooting began in spring 2004, with Robbie Stamp, Douglas’ friend and business partner, as an Executive Producer, and Walt Disney Pictures as distributors.

Adams once described the Hollywood process as “trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people come into the room and breathe on it.” The BBC has dramatised the final three books in the Hitchhikers series for radio with the surviving members of the original radio cast. The first of these (‘The Tertiary Phase’) was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2004 and is now available on audio CD. Douglas Adams himself can be heard playing the part of Agrajag. ‘So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish’ and ‘Mostly Harmless’ will make up the fourth and fifth radio series, respectively (on radio they will be titled The Quandary and Quintessential Phases) and these are due to be broadcast in May and June of 2005.

The filming of the movie finished in August 2004. The film was released on 28 April in the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia, and on 29 April 2005 in the USA. It will be released in other locations in Europe from May through July 2005. The cast includes Sam Rockwell as Zaphod Beeblebrox, Zooey Deschanel as Trillian, Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent, Mos Def as Ford Prefect, Alan Rickman as the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android, and Stephen Fry as The Book (i.e. the voice of the Guide).

Doctor Who

Douglas sent the script for the HHGG pilot radio programme to the Doctor Who production office in 1978, and was commissioned to write The Pirate Planet (see below). He had also previously attempted to submit a potential movie script, called “Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen,” which later became his novel “Life, the Universe, and Everything” (which in turn became the third Hitchhiker’s Guide radio series, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and on the Internet in September and October 2004, and subsequently released in a 3 CD set). Adams then went on to serve as script editor on the show for its seventeenth season in 1979. Altogether, he wrote three serials starring Tom Baker as the Doctor:
The Pirate Planet (the second serial in the “Key To Time” Season 16 arc)
City of Death (with producer Graham Williams, from an original storyline by writer David Fisher. It was transmitted under the pseudonym “David Agnew”)
Shada (only partially filmed and not broadcast due to industrial disputes)

Elements of Shada and City of Death were reused in Adams’ later novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, in particular the character of Professor Chronotis. Shada was eventually remade by Big Finish Productions as an audio play starring Paul McGann as the Doctor. Accompanied by partially-animated illustrations, it was webcast on the BBCi website in 2003.

Adams is credited with introducing a fan of his, the zoologist Richard Dawkins, to Dawkins’ future wife, Lalla Ward, who had played the part of Romana in Doctor Who.

Coincidentally, years before he wrote for Doctor Who, when he was at school he wrote and performed a play called Doctor Which.

Pink Floyd

His official biography shares its name with the song “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. Adams was friendly with their guitarist David Gilmour and, as his 42nd birthday gift, was allowed to make a guest appearance at one of their 1994 concerts in London, playing rhythm guitar on the songs “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse”. Adams had named their 1994 album, The Division Bell by picking the words from the lyrics to one of its tracks.

Pink Floyd and their reputation for lavish stage shows were also the inspiration for the Adams-created fictional rock band “Disaster Area”, renowned as the loudest band (and, in fact, the loudest noise) in the universe. One element of Disaster Area’s stage show was to send a space ship hurtling into a sun, and Pink Floyd made a song called “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” in 1968 about a driver of a space ship who is going to hit the sun.

Other musical links

Adams made a number of links to music of the time in his books. For example, a mouse proposes that the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is “How many roads must a man walk down?”, a line from Bob Dylan’s song Blowing in the Wind.

In So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish, Arthur listens to a Dire Straits LP and Adams goes on to pay tribute to their lead guitarist, Mark Knopfler.

Elvis is later discovered playing in a diner attended by Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent, where he is simply known as “The King”.

As well as modern rock music, Douglas Adams was a great admirer of the work of JS Bach, which provides a minor plot element in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

Adams was also a major fan of the Beatles. He makes a reference to Paul McCartney in Life, The Universe, and Everything and supposedly quotes lyrics from songs by the Beatles in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

He does this at least once in The Salmon of Doubt. In Chapter 3 there is a conversation between Kate and Dirk which includes the following exchange :

“So?” “I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair.” taken together these two lines form a quotation from Norwegian Wood on the Rubber Soul album.

Computer games and projects

Douglas Adams created an interactive fiction version of HHGG together with Steve Meretzky from Infocom in 1984. Later he was also involved in creating Bureaucracy (also by Infocom, but not based on any book). Adams was also responsible for the computer game Starship Titanic, which was published in 1999 by Simon and Schuster. The accompanying book, entitled Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic, was written by Terry Jones, since Adams was too busy with the computer game to do both. In April 1999, Adams initiated the h2g2 collaborative writing project, a forerunner of the Wiki medium.

In 1990, Adams wrote and presented a television documentary programme Hyperland also featuring Tom Baker as a computerised butler, and interviews with Ted Nelson, which was essentially about the use of Hypertext. Although Adams didn’t invent hypertext, he was an early adopter and advocate of it, and his influence shouldn’t be underestimated. This was before Tim Berners-Lee used the idea of Hypertext in his HTML. (Internet Movie Database’s Hyperland Page).

Environmentalism

Adams was also an environmental activist who campaigned on behalf of a number of endangered species. This activism included the production of the non-fiction radio series Last Chance to See, in which he and naturalist Mark Carwardine visited rare species such as the kakapo, and the publication of a tie-in book of the same name. In 1992, this was made into a CD-ROM combination of audio book, eBook and picture slide show a decade before such things became fashionable.

Premature death

Adams died of a heart attack at the age of 49, while working out at his gym in Santa Barbara, California. He had moved to Santa Barbara in 1999. He was survived by his wife, Jane, and daughter, Polly. In May 2002, The Salmon of Doubt was published, containing many short stories, essays, and letters, and eulogies from Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry and Terry Gilliam. It also includes eleven chapters of his long-awaited but unfinished novel, The Salmon of Doubt, which was to be a new Dirk Gently and/or HHGG novel, or neither.

The Salmon of Doubt

In a 1998 interview with Matt Newsome, Adams went on record as to whether “The Salmon of Doubt” was going to be a “Dirk Gently” book or a continuation of the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” series. Unfortunately, the interview did not clear much up.

Adams: The thing with Dirk was that I felt I had lost contact with that character, I couldn’t make that book viable, which is why I said, “Okay, let’s go off and do something else.” Then looking back at all the ideas that were there in “Salmon of Doubt”, I looked at it again about a year later and suddenly realised what it was that I’d been getting wrong, which was that these are essentially much more like Hitch-Hiker ideas and not like Dirk Gently ideas.

So, there will come a point I suspect at some point in the future where I will write a sixth Hitch-Hiker book. But I kind of want to do that in an odd kind of way because people have said, quite rightly, that “Mostly Harmless” is a very bleak book. And it was a bleak book. The reason for that is very simple – I was having a lousy year, for all sorts of personal reasons that I don’t want to go into, I just had a thoroughly miserable year, and I was trying to write a book against that background. And, guess what, it was a rather bleak book!
I would love to finish Hitch-Hiker on a slightly more upbeat note, so five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number.

I think that a lot of the stuff which was originally in “Salmon of Doubt”, was planned into “Salmon Doubt” and really wasn’t working, I think could be yanked out and put together some new thoughts.

Newsome: Yes, because certainly some people have heard that, “Salmon of Doubt”, was now going to be a new Hitch-Hiker book.

Adams: Well, In a sense, because I shall be salvaging some of the ideas I couldn’t make work within a Dirk Gently framework and putting them in a Hitch-Hiker framework, undergoing necessary changes on the way. And, for old time’s sake, I may call it, “Salmon of Doubt”, I may call it — well who knows! All I have to say is, bathe the whales!

Biographies

His official biography, Wish You Were Here, by Nick Webb, was published on October 6, 2003.

Another recent biography is Hitchhiker: a Biography of Douglas Adams (2003) by M. J. Simpson, with a foreword by John Lloyd.

Upon the mutual discovery that Webb and Simpson were both working on new posthumous biographies, the two authors agreed that the former would focus on Adams’ life and personality, and the latter on his work.

Earlier biographies include:
Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Companion (1988, 1993, 2002), Neil Gaiman et al. Reissued October 2003 (ISBN 1840237422) with new chapters by M. J. Simpson and David K. Dickson.
The Unofficial Guide to the Hitchhiker’s Guide (2001), M. J. Simpson. Published as The Pocket Essential Hitchhiker’s Guide (2001) in the U.K. (ISBN 1903047404)

alt.fan.douglas-adams

Douglas Adams pleased his coterie of fans in the USENET newsgroup alt.fan.douglas-adams by following the group and occasionally posting himself.
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

In response to a fan’s complaint
My apologies if this has been dragged out and beaten mercilessly already, but did everyone else get entirely bored with Mostly Harmless? I knew a couple chapters in that Adams was going to kill everyone off, and from there, it felt like that was the WHOLE purpose of the book.

Adams replied
Well, you were ahead of me then. I didn’t know till a couple of chapters before the end.

He disappointed a Canadian fan who asked
Who is your maiden aunt who lives in Winnipeg. the reason I absolutely must know is… yes, you guessed it… I LIVE IN WINNIPEG!!! and that line from the first of the gently books has been driving me insane ever since I read it!! I’d be REALLY, REALLY thrilled if Douglas responded to this himself!

by confessing:
I don’t have maiden aunt who lie in Winnipeg. I was making it up.

In response to a query about a rumour about an upcoming film, he said:
Second. Jim Carrey is not going to play Arthur Dent. Here’s a clue as to why not. Arthur Dent is English.

Douglas Adams’ works

Audio and Video: The original 12 radio episodes (from 1978 and 1980) are available in CD sets from BBC Audio (Primary & Secondary Phase), as well as on an MP3-CD. The three additional phases (Tertiary, Quandary & Quintessential) are (or soon will be) available from BBC Audio. Tertiary phase was broadcast on BBC Radio 21 September to 26 October 2004, whilst the Quandary phase is being broadcast May 3rd to 24 May 2005, and the Quintessential Phase follows immediately afterward, from 31 May through 21 June 2005. All eight episodes are being transmitted on Tuesdays, repeated on Thursdays, and made available as streaming audio after the Thursday repeat until the following Thursday. A script book for the original 12 episodes has been published, and a new script book for the final 14 episodes will be available in July 2005. An Audio DVD in 5.1 surround sound is also planned, per Dirk Maggs. The six episode TV adaptation is also available from the BBC (or its distributors, e.g. Warner Home Video in the USA and Canada) on VHS and DVD.

Novels in the HHGG series

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)
Life, the Universe and Everything (1982)
So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish (1984)
Mostly Harmless (1992)

All of the above are also available as audio books, read by Adams.

The Dirk Gently series

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987)
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul (1988)
The Salmon of Doubt (2002) (Published, unfinished, after his death. Assembled from files stored on his computers, it will probably never be known whether the book was put together correctly or not)

Other works

The Meaning of Liff (1983, with John Lloyd)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts (1985, with Geoffrey Perkins)
The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book (1986, edited by Douglas Adams and Peter Fincham), which includes
Young Zaphod Plays it Safe (also printed in a slightly reworked version in The Wizards of Odd, The Salmon of Doubt, and some omnibus editions of Hitchhiker)
The Private Life of Genghis Khan, also available in the first edition of The Salmon of Doubt, though later removed due to copyright issues
A Christmas Fairly Story (sic) by Douglas Adams and Terry Jones
A “Supplement to The Meaning of Liff” with John Lloyd and Stephen Fry
The Deeper Meaning of Liff (1990, with John Lloyd; extended version of The Meaning of Liff)
Last Chance to See (1991, with Mark Carwardine, non-fictional account of several trips to see endangered species; according to a piece in The Salmon of Doubt, this book gave Adams the most satisfaction, if not the highest sales)
Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic (written by Terry Jones (who insists he wrote the whole thing while in the nude), based on an idea by Douglas Adams – also available as an audiobook, read by Terry Jones)
The Salmon of Doubt (2002), unfinished novel manuscript (11 chapters), short stories, essays, and interviews (also available as an audiobook, read by Simon Jones)

In 2004, BBC Audio published a 3 CD set entitled Douglas Adams at the BBC which covers the author’s work from 1974 through the end of 2001, including posthumous projects. The CD is again narrated by Simon Jones.

Tributes and honorifics

Various Douglas Adams Societies exist or have existed.
There is an official appreciation society (fan club) named ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha after the sector of the galaxy that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy says the planet Earth is located in.
18610 Arthurdent is a small main belt asteroid. It was discovered by Felix Hormuth on February 7, 1998. It is named after Arthur Dent, the bewildered hero of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The name was officially announced on May 9, 2001, two days before Adams died of a heart attack.
On January 25, 2005, it was announced that asteroid with preliminary designation 2001 DA42 had been named 25924 Douglasadams in his honour. It was chosen because it referenced the year of Adams’s death, his initials and the number “42″.
On May 25, Towel Day is celebrated in recognition of Adams’s genius.

  

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Christopher Columbus (14511 – 20 May 1506)(Cristoforo Colombo in Italian, Cristobal Colon in Spanish) was probably Genoese, although many facts of his life suggest he could have been born in other places, from the Crown of Arago to the Kingdoms of Galicia or Portugal among others. He was an explorer and trader who crossed the Atlantic Ocean and reached the Americas on October 12th 1492 under the flag of Castilian Spain. He believed that the earth was a relatively small sphere, and argued that a ship could reach the Far East via a westward course. Contrary to the somewhat widespread notion that Columbus fought with opposition based on the idea that the earth was flat, it was fairly well accepted at that time that the earth was a spherical body.

What the main debate was over was whether or not it would be possible to get around it without running out of food or getting stuck in windless regions. Although his explorations were not the first to reach the Americas, they inaugurated permanent contact between the New and Old Worlds.

Columbus was not the first European to reach the continent. It is widely acknowledged today that Scandinavians had travelled to North America from Greenland in the 11th century and set up a short-lived colony at L’Anse aux Meadows. There is speculation that an obscure mariner travelled to the Americas before Columbus and provided him with sources for his claims. There are also many theories of expeditions to the Americas by a variety of peoples throughout time; see Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact, one of the most consistent is the first exploration (before 1472) of two, led by João Vaz Corte-Real to Terra Verde (today’s Newfoundland). Giovanni Caboto (better known as John Cabot) was first to reach the American mainland (which Columbus did not reach until his third voyage). However, there is one thing that sets off Columbus’ first voyage from all of these: less than two decades later, the existence of America was known to the general public throughout Europe.

Columbus landed in the Bahamas and later explored much of the Caribbean, including the isles of Juana (Cuba) and Espanola (Hispaniola), as well as the coasts of Central and South America.

He never reached the present-day U.S.A., although he is generally regarded as the first European to reach “America”, and “Columbus Day” (12 October, the anniversary of Columbus’ landing in the Bahamas) is celebrated as a holiday.

Unlike the voyage of the Scandinavians, Columbus’s voyages led to a relatively quick, general and lasting recognition of the existence of the New World by the Old World, the Columbian Exchange of species (both those harmful to humans, such as viruses, bacteria, and parasites, and beneficial to humans, such as tomatoes, potatoes, maize, and horses), and the first large-scale colonization of the Americas by Europeans. The voyages also inaugurated ongoing commerce between the Old and New Worlds, thus providing the basis for globalization.

Columbus remains a controversial figure. Some – including many Native Americans – view him as responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of tens, if not hundreds, of millions of indigenous peoples, exploitation of the Americas by Europe, and slavery in the West Indies. Others honour him for the massive boost his discoveries gave to Western expansion and culture.

Italian Americans hail Columbus as an icon of their heritage.

It has generally been accepted that he was Genovese, although doubts have persistently been voiced regarding this. His name in Spanish is Cristóbal Colón, in Catalan it is Cristòfor Colom, in Portuguese Cristóvão Colombo and in Italian Cristoforo Colombo. Columbus is a Latinized form of his surname. The Latin roots of his name can be translated “Christ-bearer, Dove”. Columbus’ signature reads Xpo ferens (“Bearing Christ”).

Columbus claimed governorship of the new territories (by prior agreement with the Spanish monarchs) and made several more journeys across the Atlantic. While regarded by some as an excellent navigator, he was seen by many contemporaries as a poor administrator and was stripped of his governorship in 1500.

Early life

There are various versions of Columbus’s origins and life before 1476. (See Columbus’s National Origin.) The account that has traditionally been supported by most historians is as follows:

Columbus was born between August 26 and October 31 in the year 1451, in the Italian port city of Genoa. His father was Domenico Colombo, a woollens merchant, and his mother was Susanna Fontanarossa, the daughter of a woollens merchant. Christopher had three younger brothers, Bartolomeo, Giovanni Pellegrino, and Giacomo, and a sister, Bianchinetta.

In 1470, the family moved to Savona, where Christopher worked for his father in wool processing. During this period he studied cartography with his brother Bartolomeo. Christopher received almost no formal education; a voracious reader, he was largely self-taught.

In 1474, Columbus joined a ship of the Spinola Financiers, who were Genoese patrons of his father. He spent a year on a ship bound towards Khios (an island in the Aegean Sea) and, after a brief visit home, spent a year in Khios. It is believed that this is where he recruited some of his sailors.

A 1476, commercial expedition gave Columbus his first opportunity to sail into the Atlantic Ocean.

The fleet came under attack by French privateers off the Cape of St. Vincent. Columbus’s ship was burned and he swam six miles to shore.

By 1477, Columbus was living in Lisbon. Portugal had become a center for maritime activity with ships sailing for England, Ireland, Iceland, Madeira, the Azores, and Africa. Columbus’s brother Bartolomeo worked as a mapmaker in Lisbon. At times, the brothers worked together as draftsmen and book collectors.

He became a merchant sailor with the Portuguese fleet, and sailed to Iceland via Ireland in 1477, to Madeira in 1478 to purchase sugar, and along the coasts of West Africa between 1482 and 1485, reaching the Portuguese trade post São Jorge da Mina at the Guinea coast.

Columbus married Felipa Perestrello Moniz, a daughter from a noble Portuguese family with some Italian ancestry, in 1479. Felipa’s father had partaken in the discovery of the Madeira Islands and owned one of them, but died when Felipa was a baby, leaving his second wife a wealthy widow.

As part of his dowry, the mariner received all of Perestello’s charts of the winds and currents of the Portuguese possessions of the Atlantic. Columbus and Felipa had a son, Diego Colón in 1480. Felipa died in January of 1485. Columbus later found a lifelong partner in Spain, an orphan named Beatriz Enriquez. She was living with a cousin in the weaving industry of Córdoba. They never married, but Columbus left Beatriz a rich woman and directed Diego to treat her as his own mother. The two had a son, Ferdinand in 1488. Both boys served as pages to Prince Juan, son of Ferdinand and Isabella, and each later contributed, with fabulous success, to the rehabilitation of their father’s reputation.

The idea

Christian Europe, long allowed safe passage to India and China (sources of valued trade goods such as silk and spices) under the hegemony of the Mongol Empire (Pax Mongolica, or “Mongol peace”), was now, after the fragmentation of that empire, under a complete economic blockade by Muslim states. In response to Muslim hegemony on land, Portugal sought an eastward sea route to the Indies, and promoted the establishment of trading posts and later colonies along the coast of Africa. Columbus had another idea. By the 1480s, he had developed a plan to travel to the Indies (then roughly meaning all of south and east Asia) by sailing west across the Ocean Sea (the Atlantic Ocean) instead.

It is sometimes claimed that the reason Columbus had a hard time receiving support for this plan was that Europeans believed that the Earth was flat. This myth can be traced to Washington Irving’s novel The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828).

The fact that the Earth is round was evident to most people of Columbus’s time, especially other sailors and navigators (Eratosthenes (276-194 BC) had in fact accurately calculated the circumference of the Earth).

The problem was that the experts did not agree with his estimates of the distance to the Indies. Most scholars accepted Ptolemy’s claim that the terrestrial landmass (for Europeans of the time, Eurasia and Africa) occupied 180 degrees of the terrestrial sphere, leaving 180 degrees of water. In fact, it occupies about 120 degrees, leaving 60 degrees unaccounted for at that time.

Columbus accepted the calculations of Pierre d’Ailly, that the land-mass occupied 225 degrees, leaving only 135 degrees of water. Moreover, Columbus believed that one degree actually covered less space on the earth’s surface than commonly believed. Finally, Columbus read maps as if the distances were calculated in Roman miles (1524 meters or 5,000 feet) rather than nautical miles (1853.99 meters or 6,082.66 feet at the equator). The true circumference of the earth is about 40,000km (24,900 statute miles of 5,280 feet each), whereas the circumference of Columbus’s earth was the equivalent of at most 19,000 modern statue miles (or 30,600km). Columbus calculated that the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan was 2,400 nautical miles (about 4,444km).

In fact, the distance is about 10,600 nautical miles (19,600km), and most European sailors and navigators concluded that the Indies were too far away to make his plan worth considering. They were right and Columbus was wrong – but, ultimately in his case, like in that of so many successful individuals, initiative and enterpreneurship ended up being more important than factual accuracy.

Columbus lobbies for funding

Columbus first presented his plan to the court of Portugal in 1485. The king’s experts believed that the route would be longer than Columbus thought (the actual distance is even longer than the Portuguese believed), and denied Columbus’s request. It is probable that he made the same outrageous demands for himself in Portugal that he later made in Spain, where he went next. He tried to get backing from the monarchs of Aragon and Castile, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, who, by marrying, had united the largest kingdoms of Spain and were ruling them together.

After seven years of lobbying at the Spanish court, where he was kept on a salary to prevent him from taking his ideas elsewhere, he was finally successful in 1492. Ferdinand and Isabella had just conquered Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the Iberian peninsula, and they received Columbus in Córdoba (in the monarchs’ Alcazar or castle). Isabella finally turned Columbus down on the advice of her “think tank” and he was leaving town in despair when Ferdinand lost his patience. Isabella sent a royal guard to fetch him and Ferdinand later rightfully claimed credit for being “the principal cause why those islands were discovered.” About half of the financing was to come from private Italian investors, which Columbus had already lined up. Financially broke from the Granada campaign, the monarchs left it to the royal treasurer to shift funds among various royal accounts on behalf of the enterprise. Columbus was to be made Admiral of the Ocean Sea and granted an inheritable governorship to the new territories he would discover, as well as a portion of all profits. The terms were absurd, but his own son later wrote that the monarchs really didn’t expect him to return.

Voyages
First voyage

The year 1492, on the evening of August 3, Columbus left from Palos with three ships, the Santa Maria, Niña and Pinta. The ships were property of Juan de la Cosa and the Pinzón brothers (Martin and Vicente Yañez), but the monarchs forced the Palos inhabitants to contribute to the expedition. He first sailed to the Canary Islands, fortunately owned by Castile, where he reprovisioned and made repairs, and on September 6 started the five week voyage across the ocean.

A legend is that the crew grew so homesick and fearful that they threatened to hurl Columbus overboard and sail back to Spain. Although the actual situation is unclear, most likely the sailors’ resentments merely amounted to complaints or suggestions.

After 29 days out of sight of land, on 7 October 1492 as recorded in the ship’s log, the crew spotted shore birds flying west and changed direction to make their landfall. A comparison of dates and migratory patterns leads to the conclusion that the birds were Eskimo curlews and American golden plover.

Columbus called the island he reached San Salvador, The Native Americans he encountered, the Taíno or Arawak, were peaceful and friendly.

He wrote with such awe of the friendly innocence and beauty of these Indians in their tropical that he inadvertently created the enduring myth of the Noble Savage. “These people have no religious beliefs, nor are they idolaters. They are very gentle and do not know what evil is; nor do they kill others, nor steal; and they are without weapons.”. No blood was shed on this first voyage; he believed conversion to Christianity would be achieved through love, not force.

On this first voyage, Columbus also explored the northeast coast of Cuba (landed on October 28) and the northern coast of Hispaniola, by December 5. He believed the peaks of Cuba to be the Himalayas, which gives one a sense of just how lost he was and how long it took the peoples of the world to map the Earth. (The vast interior of the North and South American mainlands would of course be largely mapped with the leadership of native guides and interpreters.) Here the Santa Maria ran aground and had to be abandoned. He was received by the native cacique Guacanagari, who gave him permission to leave some of his men behind. Columbus founded the settlement La Navidad and left 39 men.

On January 4, 1493 he set sail for home, not yet understanding the elliptical nature of the trade winds that had brought him west. He wrestled his ship against the wind and ran into one of the worst storms of the century. He had no choice but to land his ship in Portugal, where he was told a fleet of 100 caravels had been lost. (Astoundingly, both the Niña and the Pinta were spared.) Some have speculated that landing in Portugal was intentional.

The relations between Portugal and Castile were poor at the time, and he was held up, but finally released. Word of his discovery of new lands rapidly spread throughout Europe. He didn’t reach Spain until March 15, when the story of his journey was in its third printing. He was received as a hero in Spain, and this was his moment in the sun. He displayed several kidnapped natives and what gold he’d found to the court. Isabella immediately had the Indians clothed in warm velvets; her tenderness for her new subjects would be a thorn in conquistadors’ plans for years. Columbus also displayed the previously unknown tobacco plant, the pineapple fruit, the turkey and the sailor’s first love, the hammock. Naturally, he did not bring any of the coveted Indian spices, such as the exceedingly expensive black pepper, ginger or cloves. In his log he wrote “there is also plenty of ají, which is their pepper, which is more valuable than [black] pepper, and all the people eat nothing else, it being very wholesome” (Turner, 2004, P11). The word ají is still used in South American Spanish for chili peppers.

Second voyage

Columbus left from Cadiz, Spain for his second voyage (1493-1496) on September 24, 1493, with 17 ships carrying supplies and about 1200 men to assist in the subjugation of the Taíno and the colonization of the region. On October 13 the ships left the Canary Islands, following a more southerly course than on the first vogage.

On November 3, 1493, Columbus sighted a rugged island which he named Dominica. On the same day he landed at Marie-Galante (which he named Santa Maria la Galante). After sailing past Les Saintes (Todos los Santos), Columbus arrived at Guadaloupe (Santa Maria de Guadalupe), which he explored from November 4 through November 10. The exact course of his voyage through the Lesser Antilles is debated, but it seems likely that Columbus turned north, sighting and naming several islands including Montserrat (Santa Maria de Monstserrate), Antigua (Santa Maria la Antigua), Redonda (Santa Maria la Redonda), Nevis (Santa María de las Nieve or San Martin), Saint Kitts (San Jorge), Sint Eustatius (Santa Anastasia), Saba (San Cristobal), and Saint Martin or Saint Croix (Santa Cruz). Columbus also sighted the island chain of the Virgin Islands, (which he named Santa Ursula y las Once Mil Virgines), and named the islands of Virgin Gorda, Tortola, and Peter Island (San Pedro).

Columbus continued to the Greater Antilles and landed at Puerto Rico (San Juan Bautista) on November 19, 1493 . On November 22, he returned to Hispaniola, where he found his colonists had fallen into dispute with Indians in the interior and had been killed. He established a new settlement at Isabella, on the north coast of Hispaniola where gold had first been discovered; it was a poor location and the settlement was short-lived. He spent some time exploring the interior of the island for gold and did find some, establishing a small fort in the interior.

He left Hispaniola on April 24, 1494 and arrived at Cuba (which he named Juana) on April 30 and Jamaica on May 5. He explored the south coast of Cuba, which he believed to be a peninsula rather than an island, and several nearby islands including the Isle of Youth (La Evangelista) before returning to Hispaniola on August 20.

Before he left on his second voyage he had been directed by Ferdinand and Isabella to maintain friendly, even loving relations with the natives. However, during his second voyage he sent a letter to the monarchs proposing to enslave some of the native peoples, specifically the Caribs, on the grounds of their aggressiveness. Although his petition was refused by the Crown, in February, 1495 Columbus took 1600 Arawak as slaves. 550 slaves were shipped back to Spain; two hundred died en route, probably of disease, and of the remainder half were ill when they arrived. After legal proceedings, the survivors were released and ordered to be shipped back home.

Some of the 1600 were kept as slaves for Columbus’s men, Columbus recorded using slaves for sex in his journal. The remaining 400, who Columbus had no use for, were let go and fled into the hills, making, according to Columbus, prospects for their future capture dim. Rounding up the slaves resulted in the first major battle between the Spanish and the Indians in the new world.

The main objective of Columbus’s journey had been gold. To further this goal, he imposed a system on the natives in Cicao on Haiti, whereby all those above fourteen years of age had to find a certain quota of gold, which would be signified by a token placed around their necks. Those who failed to reach their quota would have their hands chopped off. Despite such extreme measures, Columbus did not manage to obtain much gold. One of the primary reasons for this was the fact that natives became infected with various diseases carried by the Europeans.

In his letters to the Spanish king and queen, Columbus would repeatedly suggest slavery as a way to profit from the new discoveries, but these suggestions were all rejected: the monarchs preferred to view the natives as future members of Christendom.

Third voyage and arrest

On May 30, 1498, Columbus left with six ships from Sanlucar, Spain for his third trip to the New World. He was accompanied by the young Bartolome de Las Casas, who would later provide partial transcripts of Columbus’s logs.

After stopping in the Canary Islands and Cape Verde, Columbus landed on the south coast of the island of Trinidad on July 31. From August 4 through August 12, he explored the Gulf of Paria which separates Trinidad from Venezuela. He explored the mainland of South America, including the Orinoco River. He also sailed to the islands of Chacachcare and Margarita Island and sighted and named Tobago (Bella Forma) and Grenada (Concepcion). Initially, he described the new lands as belonging to a previously unknown new continent, but later he retreated to his position that they belonged to Asia.

Columbus returned to Hispaniola on August 19 to find that many of the Spanish settlers of the new colony were discontent, having been misled by Columbus about the supposedly bountiful riches of the new world. Columbus repeatedly had to deal with rebellious settlers and Indians. He had some of his crew hanged for disobeying him.

A number of returned settlers and friars lobbied against Columbus at the Spanish court, accusing him of mismanagement. The king and queen sent the royal administrator Francisco de Bobadilla in 1500, who upon arrival (August 23) detained Columbus and his brothers and had them shipped home. Columbus refused to have his shackles removed on the trip to Spain, during which he wrote a long and pleading letter to the Spanish monarchs.

Although he regained his freedom, he did not regain his prestige and lost his governorship. As an added insult, the Portuguese had won the race to the Indies: Vasco da Gama returned in September 1499 from a trip to India, having sailed east around Africa.

Last (fourth) voyage and later life

Nevertheless, Columbus made a fourth voyage, nominally in search of the Strait of Malacca to the Indian Ocean. Accompanied by his brother Bartholomew and his thirteen-year old son Fernando, Columbus left Cadiz, Spain on May 11, 1502. On June 15, they landed at Carbet on the island of Martinique (Martinica). A hurricane was brewing, so Columbus continued on, hoping to find shelter on Hispaniola. Columbus arrived at Santo Domingo on June 29, but was denied port. Instead, the ships anchored at the mouth of the Jaina River.

After a brief stop at Jamaica, Columbus sailed to Central America, arriving at Guanaja (Isla de Pinos) in the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras on July 30. Here Bartholomew found native merchants and a large canoe, which was described as “long as a galley” and was filled with cargo. On August 14, Columbus landed on the American mainland at Puerto Castilla, near Trujillo, Honduras. Columbus spent two months exploring the coasts of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, before arriving in Almirante Bay, Panama on October 16.

In Panama, Columbus learned from the natives of gold and a strait to another ocean.

After much exploration, he established a garrison at the mouth of Rio Belen in January 1503. On April 6, one of the ships became stranded in the river. At the same time, the garrison was attacked, and the other ships were damaged. Columbus left for Hispaniola on April 16, but sustained more damage in a storm off the coast of Cuba. Unable to travel any farther, the ships were beached in St. Anne’s Bay, Jamaica, on June 25, 1503.

Columbus and his men were stranded on Jamaica for a year. Two Spaniards, with native paddlers, were sent by canoe to get help from Hispaniola. In the meantime Columbus, in a desperate effort to induce the natives to continue provisioning him and his hungry men, successfully intimidated the natives by correctly predicting a lunar eclipse, using the Ephemeris of the German astronomer Regiomontanus. Grudging help finally arrived on June 29, 1504, and Columbus and his men arrived in Sanlucar, Spain, on November 7.

While Columbus had always given the conversion of non-believers as one reason for his explorations, he grew increasingly religious in his later years. He claimed to hear divine voices, lobbied for a new crusade to capture Jerusalem, often wore Franciscan habit, and described his discoveries of the “paradise” as part of God’s plan which would soon result in the Last Judgement and the end of the world.

In his later years Columbus demanded that the Spanish Crown give him 10% of all profits made in the new lands, pursuant to earlier agreements. Because he had been relieved of his duties as governor, the crown felt not bound by these contracts and his demands were rejected.

His family later sued for part of the profits from trade with America, but ultimately lost some fifty years later.

On May 20, 1506, Columbus died in Valladolid, fairly wealthy due to the gold his men had accumulated in Hispaniola. He was still convinced that his discoveries were along the East Coast of Asia. Following his death, the body of Columbus underwent excarnation – the flesh was removed so that only his bones remained. Even after his death, his travels continued: first interred in Valladolid and then at the monastery of La Cartja in Seville, by the will of his son Diego, who had been governor of Hispaniola, the remains were transferred to Santo Domingo in 1542. In 1795 the French took over, and the corpse was removed to Havana. After the war of 1898, Cuba became independent and Columbus’s remains were moved back to the cathedral of Seville, where they were given a pompous cataflaque.

However, a lead box bearing an inscription identifying “Don Christopher Columbus’ and containing fragments of bone and a bullet was discovered at Santa Domingo in 1877. To lay to rest claims that the wrong relics were moved to Havana and that Columbus is still buried in the cathedral of Santo Domingo, DNA samples were taken in June 2003 (History Today August 2003).

Columbus’s national origin: subject of debate

Serious doubts have been expressed regarding Columbus’s national origin. Although in the popular culture he is generally assumed to be Italian (Genoese), his actual background is clouded in mystery. Very little is really known about Columbus before the mid-1470s. It has been suggested that this might have been because he was hiding something-an event in his origin or history that he deliberately kept a secret.

The issue of Columbus’s ‘nationality’ became an issue after the rise of nationalism; the issue was scarcely raised until the time of the quadricentenary celebrations in 1892 (see Columbian exposition), when Columbus’s Genoese origins became a point of pride for some Italian Americans. In New York City, rival statues of Columbus were underwritten by the Hispanic and the Italian communities, and honourable positions had to be found for each, at Columbus Circle and in Central Park.

One hypothesis is that Columbus served under the French caper Guillaume Casenove Coulon and took his surname, but later tried to hide his piracy. Some Basque historians have claimed that he was Basque. Others had said that he was a converso (Spanish Jew converted to Christianity). In Spain, even converted Jews were much mistrusted; it was suggested that many conversos were still practicing Judaism in secret. However, not only was his mysticism profoundly Catholic, recent disinterment of his son retrieved his Y chromosome (which is passed completely unchanged from father to son) has ruled out Jewish ancestry, at least in the male line.

Another theory is that he was from the island of Corsica, which at the time was part of the Genoese republic. Because the often subversive elements of the island gave its inhabitants a bad reputation, he would have masked his exact heritage. A few others also claim that Columbus was actually Catalan (Colom).

Documents found in the Alentejo region of Portugal suggest he may have been born there. In accordance with this theory, he named the island of Cuba after the Portuguese town Cuba in Alentejo – the town where he, according to Portuguese historians, had been born under the name of Salvador Fernandes Zarco (SFZ), son of Fernando, Duke of Beja, and Isabel Sciarra – and grandson of Cecília Colonna.

The Portuguese-origin thesis has him using Colom as a pseudonym. This is based on interpretation of some facts and documents of his life (as above), but mostly on an analysis of his signature under the Jewish Kabbalah, where he described his family and origin (by Macarenhas Barreto: “Fernandus Ensifer Copiae Pacis Juliae illaqueatus Isabella Sciarra Camara Mea Soboles Cubae.”, or “Ferdinand who holds the sword of power of Beja (Pax Julia in Latin), coupled with Isabel Sciarra Camara, are my generation from Cuba”). Since he never signed his name conventionally, the pseudonymus theory is reinforced, his name meaning in Latin “Bearer of Christ” (Christo ferens) “and of the Holy Spirit” (Columbus, dove in Latin), a reference to the Order of Christ which succeeded the Templars in Portugal and initiated the age of exploration.

The corollary of the above is that he was (i) knowingly diverting the Castilian kings from their target – India and (ii) had all the reasons to hide his identity and origin, as Portugal was the biggest rival of Spain (Castille) in its sea ventures. In sum, he was a “secret agent”.

It is also speculated that Columbus may have come from the island of Khios (or Chios) in Greece.

The main point of this theory is that Columbus never said he was from Genoa but from the Republic of Genoa, and that he kept his journal in Latin and Greek instead of the Italian of Genoa. He also refered to himself as “Columbus de Terra Rubra”(Columbus of the Red Earth), Khios was known for its red soil in the south of the island where the mastic trees that the Genoese traded grow. The island of Khios was under the Genoese rule (1346 – 1566 AD), for the period of his life, and therefore it was part of the Republic of Genoa. There is a village named Pirgi in the island of Khios where to this day many of its inhabitants carry the surname “Colombus.”

It has even been suggested that the epitaph on his tomb, translated as “Let me not be confused forever,” is a veiled hint left by Columbus that his identity was other than he publicly stated during his life. However, the actual phrase, “Non confundar in aeternam” (in Latin), is perhaps more accurately translated “Let me never be confounded,” and is contained in several Psalms.

It is certain that Columbus taught himself to read and write after arriving in Portugal, learned cutting-edge navigational and trading skills from the Portuguese, was commissioned by Castile, received financial backing from Genoese bankers, and was informed, in his own words, by “wise people, ecclesiastics and laymen, Latins and Greeks, Jews and Moors and with many others of other sects.” He was, in other words, a man of the Mediterranean.

The language of Columbus

Although Genoese documents have been found about a weaver named Colombo, it has also been noted that, in the preserved documents, Columbus wrote almost exclusively in Castilian, and that he used the language, with Portuguese phoenetics, even when writing personal notes to himself, to his brother, Italian friends, and to the Bank of Genoa.

There is a small handwritten Genoese gloss in an Italian edition of the History of Plinius that he read in his second voyage to America. However, it displays both Castilian and Portuguese influences. Genoese Italian was not a written language in the 15th century, but one would expect a better transliteration into this dialect from a native speaker. However, many people become “tongue-tied” when using what is to them an intimate childhood language. There is also a note in non-Genoese Italian in his own Book of Prophesies exhibiting, according to historian August Kling, “characteristics of northern Italian humanism in its calligraphy, syntax, and spelling.”

Columbus took great care and pride in writing this form of Italian.

Phillips and Phillips point out that five hundred years ago, the Latinate languages had not distanced themselves to the degree they have today. Bartolomé de las Casas in his Historia de las Indias explained that Columbus did not know Castilian well and that he was not born in Castile. In his letters he refers to himself frequently, if cryptically, as a “foreigner.” Ramón Menéndez Pidal studied the language of Columbus in 1942, suggesting that while still in Genoa, Columbus learned notions of Portugalized Spanish from travelers, who used a sort of commercial Latin or lingua franca (latín ginobisco for Spaniards). He suggests that Columbus learned Spanish in Portugal through its use in Portugal as or “adopted language of culture” from 1450. This same Spanish is used by poets like Fernan Silveira and Joan Manuel. The first testimony of his use of Spanish is from the 1480s. Pidal and many others detect a lot of Portuguese in his Spanish, where he mixes, for example, falar and hablar. But Pidal does not accept the hypothesis of a Galician origin for Columbus by noting that where Portuguese and Galician diverged, Columbus always used the Portuguese form.

Pidal doubts that Columbus could ever tell Portuguese and Spanish apart, which is why he did not make the effort to learn them properly.

Latin, on the other hand, was the language of scholarship, and here Columbus excelled. He also kept his journal in Latin, and a “secret” journal in Greek.

According to historian Charles Merrill, analysis of his handwriting indicates that it is typical of someone who was a native Catalan, and Columbus’s phonetic mistakes in Castilian are “most likely” those of a Catalan. Also, that he married a Portuguese noblewoman is presented as evidence that his origin was of nobility rather than the Italian merchant class, since it was unheard of during his time for nobility to marry outside their class. This same theory suggests he was the illegitimate son of a prominent Catalan sea-faring family, which had served as mercenaries in a sea battle against Castilian forces. Fighting against Ferdinand and being illegitimate were two excellent reasons for keeping his origins obscure. Furthermore, the disinternment of his brother’s body shows him to be a different age, by nearly a decade, than the “Bartolome Colombo” of the Genoese family.

Perceptions of Columbus

Christopher Columbus has had a cultural significance beyond his actual achievements and actions as an individual; he also became a symbol, a figure of legend. The mythology of Columbus has cast him as an archetype for both good and for evil.

The casting of Columbus as a figure of “good” or of “evil” often depends on people’s perspectives as to whether the arrival of Europeans to the New World and the introduction of Christianity or the Roman Catholic faith is seen as positive or negative.

Columbus as a hero

Traditionally, Columbus is viewed as a man of heroic stature by the European-descended population of the New World. He has often been hailed as a man of heroism and bravery, and also of faith: he sailed westward into mostly unknown waters, and his unique scheme is often viewed as ingenious. He “set an example for us all by showing what monumental feats can be accomplished through perseverance and faith” (George H. W. Bush, June 8, 1989).

Hero worship of Columbus perhaps reached its zenith around 1892, the 400th anniversary of his first arrival in the Americas. Monuments to Columbus were erected throughout the United States and Latin America, extolling him as a hero. The myth that Columbus thought the world round while his contemporaries believed in a flat earth was often repeated. This tale was used to show that Columbus was enlightened and forward looking. Columbus’s defiance of convention in sailing west to get to the far east was hailed as a model of “American”-style can-do inventiveness.

In the United States, the admiration of Columbus was particularly embraced by some members of the Italian American, Hispanic, and Catholic communities. These groups point to Columbus as one of their own to show that Mediterranean Catholics could and did make great contributions to the USA. The modern vilification of Columbus is seen by his supporters and by many scholars as being politically motivated and non-historical.

Columbus as a villain

Much criticism focuses on the continuing positive Columbus myths and celebrations (such as Columbus Day) and their effects on American thought towards present-day Native Americans. Official celebrations of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage in 1992 were muted, and demonstrators protested marking the anniversary at all. It was in this spirit that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez signed, in October, 2002, a decree changing the name of Venezuela’s “Columbus Day” to “The Day of Indigenous Resistance” in honor of the nation’s indigenous groups. On October 12, 2004, supporters of Chavez destroyed a 100-year old statue of Columbus in Caracas. They did this because they found Columbus guilty of ‘imperialist genocide’. They blotted the statue with slogans like ‘Columbus Bush’. (For more, see Columbus Day.) The genocide and atrocious acts committed by the Spanish against the natives (the Tainos in particular) are well documented in terrifying detail in the letters of Bartelome de Las Casas. Columbus’ cruel acts against indigenous peoples of the Caribbean have been well documented and are accepted as truth.

  

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William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955), commonly known as Bill Gates, is an American businessman and a microcomputer pioneer. He, along with others, wrote the original Altair BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 (an early microcomputer). He, with Paul Allen, co-founded Microsoft Corporation, and is now its chairman and "Chief Software Architect." According to Forbes magazine, Gates is the wealthiest person in the world.

Biography

Gates was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955 to William H. Gates, Sr., a corporate lawyer, and Mary Maxwell Gates, board member of Berkshire Hathaway, First Interstate Bank, Pacific Northwest Bell and the national board of United Way. He is really William Henry Gates III, his great-grandfather being the true William Henry Gates Sr.

Gates attended Lakeside School, Seattle’s most exclusive prep school where he was able to develop his programming skills on the school’s minicomputer. In need of more computing power, Gates and his computer buddy, Paul Allen sneaked into the University of Washington computer labs. They were later caught but struck an agreement with lab administrators by providing free computer help to students.

He later went on to study at Harvard University, but dropped out without graduating to pursue what would become a lifelong career in software development.

While he was a student at Harvard, he co-authored with Paul Allen the original Altair BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 (the first commercially successful personal computer) in the mid 1970s. It was inspired by BASIC, an easy-to-learn programming language developed at Dartmouth College for teaching purposes.

Gates married Melinda French on January 1, 1994. They have three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (born April 26, 1996), Rory John Gates (born May 23, 1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (born September 14, 2002).

In 1994, Gates acquired the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci; as of 2003 it was on display at the Seattle Art Museum.

In 1997, Gates was the victim of a bizarre extortion plot by Chicago resident Adam Quinn Pletcher. Gates testified at the subsequent trial. Pletcher was convicted and sentenced in July 1998 to six years in prison. In February 1998 he was attacked by Noël Godin with a cream pie.

In his religious views, it is likely that Gates is agnostic. Asked by a TIME interviewer whether he believed in God, Gates replied "I don’t have any evidence on that."

According to Forbes, Gates donated money to the 2004 presidential campaign of George W. Bush. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Gates is cited as having donated at least $33,335 to over 50 political campaigns during the 2004 election cycle.

On December 14, 2004, Bill Gates joined Berkshire Hathaway’s board, formalizing the relationship between him and Warren Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway is a conglomerate that includes Geico (automobile insurance), Benjamin Moore (paint) and Fruit of the Loom (textiles).

Gates also serves on the board of Icos, a Bothell biotech company.

On March 2, 2005, the foreign office of the United Kingdom announced that Gates would receive the title of Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for his contribution to enterprise in the United Kingdom and his efforts in poverty reduction around the world. Because he is not a Commonwealth citizen, he cannot use the title of "Sir," but may put letters "KBE" (Knight of the British Empire) after his name.

Home

The Gates live in the exclusive suburb of Medina, Washington, in a huge earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington. The Gates home is a very modern 21st century house in the "Pacific lodge" style, with advanced electronic systems everywhere. In one respect though it is more like an 18th or 19th century mansion: It has a large private library with a domed reading room. While it does have a classic flavor, the home has many unique qualities. Visitors are surveyed and given a microchip upon entrance. This small chip sends signals throughout the house, and a given room’s temperature and other conditions will change according to preset user preferences. According to King County public records, as of 2002, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $113 million, and the annual property tax is just over $1 million.

Microsoft Corporation

In 1975, Gates and Allen co-founded Micro-Soft, later Microsoft Corporation, to market their version of BASIC, called Microsoft BASIC. Microsoft BASIC became the foundation of a successful software licensing business, being bundled (usually in ROM) with most home and personal computers of the 1970s and 1980s.

In February 1976, Bill Gates wrote the Open Letter to Hobbyists, which annoyed the computer hobbyist community by asserting that a commercial market existed for computer software. Gates stated in the letter that software should not be copied without the publisher’s permission, which he equated to piracy. While legally correct, Gates’ proposal was unprecedented in a community that was influenced by its ham radio legacy and hacker ethic, in which innovations and knowledge were freely shared in the community. Nevertheless, Gates was right about the market prospects and his efforts paid off: Microsoft Corporation became one of the world’s most successful commercial enterprises, and a key player in the creation of a retail software industry.

Microsoft’s key moment came when IBM was planning to enter the personal computer market with its IBM Personal Computer (PC), which was released in 1981. IBM approached Microsoft for an operating system (they had already licensed Microsoft’s language products), but Microsoft did not have one to sell, and referred IBM to Digital Research. At Digital Research, IBM representatives spoke to Gary Kildall’s wife Dorothy, but she declined to sign their standard non-disclosure agreement, which she considered overly burdensome.

IBM then returned to talk to Microsoft. Gates obtained rights to a cloned design of CP/M, QDOS, from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer products for $50,000, licensed it to IBM for "about $80,000", according to Gates, and MS-DOS/PC-DOS was born. Later, IBM discovered that Gates’ operating system could have infringement problems with CP/M, contacted Kildall, and in exchange for a promise not to sue, made an agreement that CP/M would be sold along with PC-DOS when the IBM PC was released. The price set by IBM for CP/M was $250 and for MS-DOS/PC-DOS it was $40. MS-DOS/PC-DOS outsold CP/M many times over, becoming the standard. Microsoft’s licensing deal with IBM was not particularly lucrative in itself (it did not include royalties), but critically, Microsoft retained the right to sell MS-DOS to other computer manufacturers. By marketing MS-DOS aggressively to manufacturers of IBM-PC clones, Microsoft gained unprecedented visibility in the microcomputer industry, even rivalling IBM.

In the mid-1980s Gates became excited about the possibilities of compact disc for storage, and sponsored the publication of the book CD-ROM: The New Papyrus that promoted the idea of CD-ROM.

In the late 1980s, Microsoft and IBM partnered in the development of a more advanced operating system, OS/2. The operating system was marketed in connection with a new hardware design, the PS/2, that was proprietary to IBM. As the project progressed, Gates oversaw continuing friction with IBM over the system’s design, hardware support, and user interface. Ultimately he came to believe that IBM wanted to marginalize Microsoft from having any input in OS/2′s development. On May 16, 1991 Gates announced to Microsoft employees that the OS/2 partnership was over and Microsoft would henceforth focus its platform efforts on Windows and the NT kernel. In the ensuing years OS/2 fell to the side and Windows became the favored PC platform.

During the transition from MS-DOS to Windows, Microsoft gained ground on application software competitors such as WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.

Some years later, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser displaced Netscape’s Navigator, in a turn of events that many attributed to Microsoft’s inclusion of Internet Explorer in Windows at no extra charge. An opposing view is that the inclusion in Windows was less important in Internet Explorer’s adoption than Microsoft’s improvement of the browser’s features to a level comparable with Navigator.

As the architect of Microsoft’s product strategy, Gates has aggressively broadened the company’s range of products and, once it has obtained a leading position in a category, has vigorously defended that position. His and other Microsoft executives’ strategic decisions have more than once drawn the concern of competition regulators, and in some cases have been ruled illegal.

In 2000, Gates promoted long-time friend and Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer to the role of Chief Executive Officer and took on the role of "Chief Software Architect".

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

With his wife, Gates founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization. The foundation’s grants have provided funds for underrepresented minority college scholarships, AIDS prevention, diseases that strike mainly in the third world, and other causes. The Foundation currently provides 90% of the world budget for the attempted eradication of poliomyelitis (polio), the World Health Organization having ‘moved on’ to other diseases. In June 1999, Gates and his wife donated US$5 billion to their foundation. They have donated more than US$100 million to help children suffering from AIDS. On January 26, 2005, it was announced that the Foundation had made a further contribution of US$750 million to the international Vaccine Fund to help fight diseases such as diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, poliomyelitis and yellow fever. As of 2005, the foundation has an endowment of approximately US$28 billion. Accolades Honorary KBE from the United Kingdom announced, 2005 [1]
Honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, 2002
Top 100 influential people in media, the Guardian, 2001
The Sunday Times power list, 1999
Upside Elite 100, Ranked 2nd, 1999
Top 50 Cyber Elite, TIME magazine, Ranked 1st, 1998
Top 100 most powerful people in sports, The Sporting News, Ranked 28th, 1997
CEO of the year, Chief Executive Officers magazine, 1994
Entomologists have named the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor [2]

Estimated wealth Gates has been number one of the "Forbes 400" 1993-2005, he’s been number one of Forbes magazine’s "The World’s Richest People" 1996, 1998-2005. According to Forbes list of "The World’s Richest People" [3] his net worth has been:
1996 – US$18.5 billion, ranked #1
1997 – $36.4 billion, ranked #2 ([4]) (behind the Sultan of Brunei who was included for this one year despite Forbes’ usual policy of excluding heads of state)
1998 – $51.0 billion, ranked #1
1999 – $90.0 billion, ranked #1
2000 – $60.0 billion, ranked #1
2001 – $58.7 billion, ranked #1
2002 – $52.8 billion, ranked #1
2003 – $40.7 billion, ranked #1
2004 – $46.6 billion, ranked #1
2005 – $46.5 billion, ranked #1

The reduction in Gates’ wealth since 2000 reflects a fall in Microsoft’s share price and the multi-billion dollar gifts he has made to his charitable foundations.

Portrayals in films and TV

Bill Gates is often characterized as the quintessiential example of a super-intelligent nerd with immense power. This has in turn led to pop culture stereotypes of Gates as a tyrant or evil genius commanding power over an all-powerful empire of technology. Several films and television shows have portrayed either the real Bill Gates or a fictionalized version of him, often according to these cliches.

Fictional portrayals

Films and television shows that have portrayed a fictionalized version of Gates include:
The Net (1995) – Angela Bennett, a reclusive software engineer played by Sandra Bullock, inadvertently discovers a backdoor in a security program being marketed to the federal government by a Microsoft-like software company headed by billionaire Jeff Gregg, who bears a marked resemblance to Bill Gates in the few scenes where he appears. The discovery makes Angela the target of a cyber-terrorist group known as the Praetorians, apparently loyal to Gregg, who erase her identity and attempt to kill her in an effort to recover the incriminating disk.

The Net (1995) – Angela Bennett, a reclusive software engineer played by Sandra Bullock, inadvertently discovers a backdoor in a security program being marketed to the federal government by a Microsoft-like software company headed by billionaire Jeff Gregg, who bears a marked resemblance to Bill Gates in the few scenes where he appears. The discovery makes Angela the target of a cyber-terrorist group known as the Praetorians, apparently loyal to Gregg, who erase her identity and attempt to kill her in an effort to recover the incriminating disk.

Simpsons Episode "Das Bus"

The Simpsons (February 15, 1998) (Season 9, Episode 5F11) – Bill Gates comes to "buy" Homer Simpson’s ambiguous internet company, CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet. Gates orders his underlings to "buy out" Simpson’s business, so they wreck the place. When Homer asks for the money Gates replies "O, I didn’t get rich by writing a lot of checks! [manic laughter]"
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (1999) – an Army general complains that his new Windows 98 upgrade is no more stable than his previous copy of Windows 95, and demands to see Bill Gates. When an animated Gates begins to explain just how much stabler Windows 98 actually is using technobabble, the general shoots him.

Pretty Sammy 2, an anime title, has an evil character called Biff Standard, whose software company StandardSoft tries to conquer the Japanese operating system market (dominated by the obviously superior Pineapple software in this show) by actively persecuting the main characters.
Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) – a dramatized film about the history of Apple and Microsoft, with Anthony Michael Hall playing Bill Gates.
Tom Clancy’s Net Force (1999) – Many believe the main protagonist, William Stiles, who tries to take over the world via control of the internet, to be based on Bill Gates. They note the similarities in the names, William being the longhand of Bill and a stile being a small bridge over a wall used instead of a gate.

AntiTrust (2001) – a film about a programmer in a fictional software company. Tim Robbins plays Gary Winston, the corporate head, whose characteristics are believed by some to be derived from Gates. Gates is also mentioned by name in the film.
Clockstoppers (2002) – Henry Gates is a megalomaniacal corporate head who wants to take over the world using technology. (Henry is Bill Gates’ middle name.)
Nothing So Strange (2002) – a film about a fictional assassination of Gates in 1999.
2DTV (2004) (Series 4, Episode 6) – Bill Gates is seen at his "computer-shaped" home writing a letter to a customer, when the Office Assistant pops up and starts annoying Gates. Ultimately, it drives the animated Gates to near-suicide, at which point the paperclip proclaims, "Hi there, it looks like you’re writing a suicide note", and a number of disgruntled customers appear, continuing, "would you like some help?". Gates also appears in episode 4 of this series, in an animated "Matrix for Windows" spoof, mocking the growing size of Microsoft operating systems.
Family Guy (August 29, 2001) (Season 3, Episode 08) – In one episode, Gates is flying through the air on a jetpack with Disney CEO and chairman Michael Eisner, who says "God, the people look like ants from up here", to which Gates replies, "They are ants, Michael, they ARE ants!"
Family Guy (November 29, 2001) (Season 3, Episode 12) – Gates is playing poker with Peter Griffin, Mr. Pewterschmidt, Michael Eisner, and Ted Turner in one episode. When Turner asks whether Aces are high or low, Peter says, "They go both ways," and so Gates says, "Hah! He said they go both ways!" Then Turner explains the joke and kills it. Later in the episode, Peter brakes behind a toll booth and asks for a quarter to defray the toll. Gates replies, "What’s a quarter?", a question which the other men begin to ponder as well.
In CnC: Yuri’s Revenge, a man known only as "Chairman Bing" appears as the CEO of a company named Massivesoft
In Robopon 2 (video game for the Game Boy Advance), there is a man named Mr. Gait who owns a giant software conglomerate named Macrosoft.
An episode of Pinky And The Brain features The Brain’s arch Nemisis, Snowball, attempting to take over the world by impersonating the Millionaire software designer "Bill Grates".

Real-life portrayals

Films and television shows where Bill Gates has actually appeared as himself include:
Frasier – Bill Gates is invited as a guest speaker on Dr. Frasier Crane’s radio show. However, straight from the moment the radio show starts, all the callers only have questions for Gates (about Windows computers) and Dr. Crane does not get any attention.
Triumph of the Nerds – Bill Gates gives an interview in the documentary film that explores the history of the personal computer.

References in computer software

Many computer programs, most of which are for systems other than Microsoft Windows, contain more-or-less direct references to Bill Gates. Obviously, these references are less than flattering. Some include:
The Open Source game XBill, in which a character known as "Bill", wearing large eyeglasses, is trying to install Wingdows (a virus disguised as windows) on computers running other operating systems.

The Amiga game Uropa², in which the main enemy is known as "Bill Setag" (Gates in reverse).
In Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor, the player is given a side-quest to kill an evil villain named "William Setag" and rescue the princess he kidnapped.
The Windows game Arcanum includes a character named Gilbert Bates, who is a fabulously wealthy entrepeneur. The familiar form of his name, Gil Bates, is a spoonerism of Bill Gates.

The PC adventure game Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon features a software company called ScumSoft, which is an obvious parody of Microsoft Corporation. The company’s evil president is a small, nerdy-looking guy with glasses called Elmo Pug, who seems to bear a striking resemblance to Bill Gates.

A computer program for designing computer chips (Electronic Design Automation) called Build Gates, a gate in this context referring to a logic gate.

The name of Slax’s Kill Bill edition is a parody of the movie Kill Bill. The wallpaper is a Tux in a yellow jumpsuit similar to the bride in Kill Bill, who is going to Kill Bill (Gates).
In the Illusion Softworks game Mafia, a "William Gates" is featured as a supposed Kentuckian bootlegger.

  

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Sabeer Bhatia born on December 30, 1968 is the co-founder of Hotmail and an entrepreneur. Bhatia was born to a Punjabi Hindu family in Chandigarh, India. His father, Baldev Bhatia, was as an officer in the Indian Army who later joined the Indian Ministry of Defence, while his mother, Daman Bhatia, was a senior official at the Central Bank of India.

Sabeer Bhatia an ordinary guy from banglore came to Los Angeles in September 1988. He was 19 at that time and had only $250 in his pocket and knew nobody in America. Sabeer went to Stanford University in 1989 to pursue his M.S. in Electrical Engineering. At Stanford, he worked on Ultra Low Power VLSI Design.

Sabeer intended to complete his degrees and go back to India to work with some Large Indian Company as an engineer. Sabeer did his MS in 1993. Sabeer thought that one should be superhuman to start a company and it was an impossible task for him.

But during his graduation in Stanford, he used to spend his lunch hours in the basement of Terman Auditorium. He listened to enterpreneurs like Scott Mc Nealy MBA’80, Steve Wozniak and Marc Andreesen, they all had a common message – “You can do it too.” Sabeer knew that famous people always says so to inspire others.

After completing his graduation Sabeer dropped the idea of going home. He took up a job with Apple Computers and so did Jack Smith, his friend and co-worker.

Sabeer and Jack had a dream to start a company and they were really working hard on it. They wanted to email notes to each other, but they were afraid of being accused by their bosses of spending their working hours on personal projects. They had personal American Online account, but they could not access it from office network. Jack was frustrated by all this problem. And this gave birth to an idea of free e-mail accounts that can be accessed anonymously over the web – HOTMAIL

In mid-1995, Sabeer began his business plan for a netbased personal database called Javasoft. Javasoft became the front for Hotmail for Jack and Sabeer in December.

Sabeer knew Hotmail was an explosive concept. Sabeer convinced Imperial Bank to loan him $10,000. Then he convinced McLean Public Relations to represent Hotmail in exchange of stock.

In June the product was ready to launch, at that time they had 15 employees working for them. They launched it on July 4, 1996 – Independence Day – as Sabeer and jack thought free email was a great Independent idea and populist tool. Every body who owned a computer had their own email accounts, but with webmail, they could log on from anywhere in the world. The first users found it all by themselves and then it spread like a forest fire. there were 100 in first hour, 200 in second hour and 250 in third hour. the idea was so intuitively powerful that 80% of those who signed up for Hotmail; learned about it from a friend.

In just 2 1/2 years, Sabeer built Hotmail’s user base faster than any media company in history- Faster than CNN, faster than America Online. By summer 1998, with 25 million active e-mail accounts, the company was signing up new users at the rate of 125,000 a day.

On the New year eve,1997 the negotiations with Microsoft was finalised and the ownership of Hotmail was exchanged for 2,769,148 shares of Microsoft worth $400 million. Everbody in the valley was shocked with the dealing. but 8 months after the New Years announcement, microsoft ‘s $400 million price tag looked like a bargain, considering Hotmail had more than tripled in size since it was purchased. Nobody thinks the price was unjust anymore. Sabeer had a 3year commitment (through 200) to head Hotmail for microsoft.

Being the head of the world’s fastest-growing media company, backed with Microsoft’s financial muscles Hotmail’s Juggernaut appears unstoppable. He feels absurd when people call him ‘Powerful Man’ he is just ordinary flesh and blood like anyother man.

He say – “If something is success, it is wildly successful.”

  

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Sabeer Bhatiya an ordinary guy from banglore came to Los Angeles eleven years ago, in September 1988. He was 19 at that time and had only $250 in his pocket and knew nobody in America. Sabeer intended to complete his degrees and go back to India to work with some Large Indian Company as an engineer. Sabeer did his MS in 1993. Sabeer thought that one should be superhuman to start a company and it was an impossible task for him.

But during his graduation in Stanford, he used to spend his lunch hours in the basement of Terman Auditorium. He listened to enterpreneurs like Scott Mc Nealy MBA’80, Steve Wozniak and Marc Andreesen, they all had a common message – “You can do it too.” Sabeer knew that famous people always says so to inspire others.

After completing his graduation Sabeer dropped the idea of going home. He took up a job with Apple Computers and so did Jack Smith, his friend and co-worker.

Sabeer and Jack had a dream to start a company and they were really working hard on it. They wanted to email notes to each other, but they were afraid of being accused by their bosses of spending their working hours on personal projects. They had personal American Online account, but they could not access it from office network. Jack was frustrated by all this problem. And this gave birth to an idea of free e-mail accounts that can be accessed anonymously over the web – HOTMAIL

In mid-1995, Sabeer began his business plan for a netbased personal database called Javasoft. Javasoft became the front for Hotmail for Jack and Sabeer in December.

Sabeer knew Hotmail was an explosive concept. Sabeer convinced Imperial Bank to loan him $100,00. Then he convinced McLean Public Relations to represent Hotmail in exchange of stock.

In June the product was ready to launch, at that time they had 15 employees working for them. They launched it on July 4, 1996 – Independence Day – as Sabeer and jack thought free email was a great Independent idea and populist tool. Every body who owned a computer had their own email accounts, but with webmail, they could log on from anywhere in the world. The first users found it all by themselves and then it spread like a forest fire. there were 100 in first hour, 200 in second hour and 250 in third hour. the idea was so intuitively powerful that 80% of those who signed up for Hotmail; learned about it from a friend.

In just 2 1/2 years, Sabeer built Hotmail’s user base faster than any media company in history- Faster than CNN, faster than America Online. By summer 1998, with 25 million active e-mail accounts, the company was signing up new users at the rate of 125,000 a day.

On the New year eve,1997 the negotiations with Microsoft was finalised and the ownership of Hotmail was exchanged for 2,769,148 shares of Microsoft worth $400 million. Everbody in the valley was shocked with the dealing. but 8 months after the New Years announcement, microsoft ‘s $400 million price tag looked like a bargain, considering Hotmail had more than tripled in size since it was purchased. Nobody thinks the price was unjust anymore. Sabeer had a 3year commitment (through 200) to head Hotmail for microsoft.

Being the head of the world’s fastest-growing media company, backed with Microsoft’s financial muscles Hotmail’s Juggernaut appears unstoppable. He feels absurd when people call him ‘Powerful Man’ he is just ordinary flesh and blood like anyother man.