I was so inspired by pg's essay, I thought I'd start a thread for the rest of us. To keep things manageable, how about a 5 hero limit with one line for each.
Evariste Galois - pulled the world's most famous all-nighter by writing down all the math in his head for posterity, then got killed in a duel in the morning.
Magic Johnson - did whatever it took to make everyone else around him better.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, who turned his personal tragedy into sharing spirituality and humanity in a manner I have found nowhere else.
Laura Barrett Mikesell - You never forget the teacher who actually encouraged you to do great things.
My grandfathers - made unimaginable sacrifices by coming to this country (U.S.) so that I could have this great life.
Limiting it to 5 makes it tough! Right off the top I'm going to remove family members and Paul Graham from consideration (and encourage others to do so to obviate the need for any "obligatory mentions").
After a couple minutes thinking about it, I've got (in no particular order):
Hank Rearden (fictional) - A brilliant, but "normal" engineer and businessman breaks free of society's shackles through his ethics and determination. I try to channel him every time I sit down to work.
Jack Kerouac - Spent his life living, writing, dreaming and merging the three wherever he could. Maintained an ambitious vision of his life's work and actually finished it.
George Clooney - the guy emanates class.
Alexander Mackendrick - His teachings and notes on film directing are a tour de force. Creativity meets pragmatism.
Jeff Temple - Taught astrophysics at PA Governors' School for the Sciences. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that he's the reason I applied to MIT.
OK, I'm going to cheat now and add a couple extra mentors and friends whose heroics could scarcely fit one book, let alone one line.
Hal Abelson - My undergraduate advisor. Helped write SICP (one of the most important works I've read), spearheaded OpenCourseWare, showed me the intersection of technology and policy.
Patrick Winston - My undergrad project advisor. Headed the AI Lab, brilliant speaker, and a formative influence who molded my appreciation of "important work."
And one more cheat:
Richard Feynman - Great thinker, teacher, and human being.
Richard Branson - for a hugely successful business man, he has done things right. He truly seems to care about his employees, customers and profit in a respectable way. That isn't common for a billionaire.
Barack Obama - The game of politics forces the players to be tireless self promoters, but somehow Barack manages to come off as genuine, honest and more concerned with civic duty than personal gain.
Sorry, but I feel the one line limit changes this from a potentially interesting and insightful thread to an endless sea of lists of names.
Richard Dawkins: I remember when I first saw the link to his documentary "The root of all evil?" on reddit. I was quickly enchanted by his ability to beautifully relate ideas and convey their wonder and simplicity. (Although I had heard of Richard Dawkings before, I didn't learn who the captivating narrator was until after watching.) Later on, I was impressed with his ability to attack the core of arguments and sidestep being pushed into a corner by misrepresentations and side-arguments.
Ayn Rand: After being taught for a decade that "morality" was synonymous with obedience to authority and a repressive code of social behavior, in middle school I began to quietly rebel and privately switch the meanings of moral and immoral. Then, I was introduced to Ayn Rand. Aside from the uplifting nature of her demonstrations of the positive nature of selfish and egoistic concepts, I was greatly relieved to find that I did not have to submit to quietly seething against society's oppressive definitions of the terms; I did not have to mentally wander without a way to think about what I deep down considered truly good.
Ron Paul: He showed me that politics could be more than something for citizens accepting of the status quo to squabble over and disenchanted, apathetic souls to cynically joke about. In addition, I am always impressed with his ability to never be backed into a corner, to turn the tables on those attempting to cast him and his ideas in a negative light, and his honesty and ability to get back to the core issues.
Jared Diamond: While I do not know too much about the man himself, I am nevertheless extremely impressed with the ideas presented in Guns, Germs, and Steel, especially his emphasis on chasing ideas to their root. With its emphasis on patterns in history, it has completed changed my outlook on history, the importance of individuals, and human nature. Furthermore, what is perhaps the most important idea in the book, that all useful technologies and other inventions over areas and good periods of time if and only if political homogeneity does not preclude adoption, has changed my views on government. I strive to share the same emphasis on searching for the root cause, which I suppose goes along well with the hacker's focus on abstraction and elegance; many essays I have written, including all of my SAT and ACT essays (practice and real), have traced simple questions about life back to either behavioral psychology, evolutionary psychology -- or ideas present in Guns, Germs and Steel (or some combination thereof).
I could list my heroes, but they're basically the same set of people that I already quote here constantly. Mostly people who have made major contributions to the philosophy and culture of the Internet, plus a few others from the social sciences and education theory.
Roald Amundsen --- The first man to reach the south pole. It's not the accomplishment itself, but the way it was accomplished. If interested, read "The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen's Race to the South Pole."
Ernest Rutherford - Discovered the proton and originated the orbital theory of the atom. Director of a lab that launched the careers of many other famous physicists.
William Pickering - Director of NASA's JPL during the moon years. Held the position for 22 years.
Peter Jackson - Created a movie industry out of nothing in a country thousands of miles away from Hollywood.
Sir Edmund Hillary - Helped build hundreds of schools and hospitals in Nepal. Climbed Everest. Crossed the Antarctic in a hacked together tractor. Jet-boated up the Ganges.
Charles Upham - Won the Victoria's Cross twice during WW II.
67 comments
[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadMagic Johnson - did whatever it took to make everyone else around him better.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, who turned his personal tragedy into sharing spirituality and humanity in a manner I have found nowhere else.
Laura Barrett Mikesell - You never forget the teacher who actually encouraged you to do great things.
My grandfathers - made unimaginable sacrifices by coming to this country (U.S.) so that I could have this great life.
Linus Torvalds - Kernel Creator, and extremely smart.
Richard Stallman - For creating gnu, and helping us all to be free
erm... are fictional characters allowed?
and for never selling out.
ayn rand
jay z
srinivasa ramanujan
After a couple minutes thinking about it, I've got (in no particular order):
Hank Rearden (fictional) - A brilliant, but "normal" engineer and businessman breaks free of society's shackles through his ethics and determination. I try to channel him every time I sit down to work.
Jack Kerouac - Spent his life living, writing, dreaming and merging the three wherever he could. Maintained an ambitious vision of his life's work and actually finished it.
George Clooney - the guy emanates class.
Alexander Mackendrick - His teachings and notes on film directing are a tour de force. Creativity meets pragmatism.
Jeff Temple - Taught astrophysics at PA Governors' School for the Sciences. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that he's the reason I applied to MIT.
OK, I'm going to cheat now and add a couple extra mentors and friends whose heroics could scarcely fit one book, let alone one line.
Hal Abelson - My undergraduate advisor. Helped write SICP (one of the most important works I've read), spearheaded OpenCourseWare, showed me the intersection of technology and policy.
Patrick Winston - My undergrad project advisor. Headed the AI Lab, brilliant speaker, and a formative influence who molded my appreciation of "important work."
And one more cheat:
Richard Feynman - Great thinker, teacher, and human being.
Thich Quang Duc - A man who became an idea.
Galileo - Spoke truth to power.
Richard Feynman - A principled genius.
Tim Berners-Lee
Steve Wozniak
Warren Buffett
William Blake - the most singularly original poet/artist I've ever read. I wish my products were like his poems.
Benjamin Franklin - limitless intellectual curiosity + an astonishingly good writer
Marcus Aurelius - the guy who'll get you through the bad times
My list is heavy on scientists and philosophers, since I especially admire the ones who changed the way we think (for the better, IMHO).
Socrates
Epicurus
Diogenes the Cynic
Sun Tzu
Shen Kuo
Machiavelli
Leonardo da Vinci (the Shen Kuo of the West! ;-)
Galileo
Kepler
Hume
Darwin
Swift
Franklin
Jefferson
Nietzsche
Sun Yat-sen
Wittgenstein
Feynman
Sagan
Abraham Lincoln - for his brutal honesty
Mahatma Ghandi - for changing the world
Steve Wozniak - for solving his own problems
Ford Prefect - always knows where his towel is
Barack Obama - The game of politics forces the players to be tireless self promoters, but somehow Barack manages to come off as genuine, honest and more concerned with civic duty than personal gain.
Richard Dawkins: I remember when I first saw the link to his documentary "The root of all evil?" on reddit. I was quickly enchanted by his ability to beautifully relate ideas and convey their wonder and simplicity. (Although I had heard of Richard Dawkings before, I didn't learn who the captivating narrator was until after watching.) Later on, I was impressed with his ability to attack the core of arguments and sidestep being pushed into a corner by misrepresentations and side-arguments.
Ayn Rand: After being taught for a decade that "morality" was synonymous with obedience to authority and a repressive code of social behavior, in middle school I began to quietly rebel and privately switch the meanings of moral and immoral. Then, I was introduced to Ayn Rand. Aside from the uplifting nature of her demonstrations of the positive nature of selfish and egoistic concepts, I was greatly relieved to find that I did not have to submit to quietly seething against society's oppressive definitions of the terms; I did not have to mentally wander without a way to think about what I deep down considered truly good.
Ron Paul: He showed me that politics could be more than something for citizens accepting of the status quo to squabble over and disenchanted, apathetic souls to cynically joke about. In addition, I am always impressed with his ability to never be backed into a corner, to turn the tables on those attempting to cast him and his ideas in a negative light, and his honesty and ability to get back to the core issues.
Jared Diamond: While I do not know too much about the man himself, I am nevertheless extremely impressed with the ideas presented in Guns, Germs, and Steel, especially his emphasis on chasing ideas to their root. With its emphasis on patterns in history, it has completed changed my outlook on history, the importance of individuals, and human nature. Furthermore, what is perhaps the most important idea in the book, that all useful technologies and other inventions over areas and good periods of time if and only if political homogeneity does not preclude adoption, has changed my views on government. I strive to share the same emphasis on searching for the root cause, which I suppose goes along well with the hacker's focus on abstraction and elegance; many essays I have written, including all of my SAT and ACT essays (practice and real), have traced simple questions about life back to either behavioral psychology, evolutionary psychology -- or ideas present in Guns, Germs and Steel (or some combination thereof).
Or encourages you to be concise to keep the thread readable enough for working people taking 5 minutes breaks.
"something useless"
Honestly, do you guys really believe that these phrases describe this thread?
I really enjoyed reading about people's choices, no matter how much they had to say, didn't you?
Isaac Asimov - filled my teen years with fun, promoted friendliness, humanism and wonder
Captain Beefheart - incarnated ineffability, inestimable artistic genius and influence
Leonardo - the archetype of the universal man
George Orwell - bravery, promotion of liberty, damn fine writer
Lao Tzu/Buddha - kinda hard to put into words ;) showed me a different way to see things
Marvin Minsky
Thomas Hardy
Rtm/PG
Henri Petroski
Darwin
Knuth
Stroustrup
Jesus
W.F. Buckley
John Piper
wow. 5 is so few; I'm pretty sure I could go on listing names for a while...
Ernest Rutherford - Discovered the proton and originated the orbital theory of the atom. Director of a lab that launched the careers of many other famous physicists.
William Pickering - Director of NASA's JPL during the moon years. Held the position for 22 years.
Peter Jackson - Created a movie industry out of nothing in a country thousands of miles away from Hollywood.
Sir Edmund Hillary - Helped build hundreds of schools and hospitals in Nepal. Climbed Everest. Crossed the Antarctic in a hacked together tractor. Jet-boated up the Ganges.
Charles Upham - Won the Victoria's Cross twice during WW II.