My Heroes
Today is Darwin Day.
Not only is Charles Darwin one of my favorite historical trouble makers, as I wrote yesterday, he is also one of my all time heroes. He wasn’t afraid to follow his ideas and the evidence wherever it might lead - even when it ran contrary to the religion he had chosen to study. It’s seems easy for us to assume we would have done the same thing, but it really did take a lot of guts.
I thought today would be a good day to run through a short list of some of my favorite people who are/were programmers, educators, and/or trouble makers. All of the people below are people whose work and/or ideas have had a significant impact on my life, though perhaps not in a way directly related to the category in which they are listed.
It would be fair to call some of them genuine heroes to me.
Programmers
- Alan Turing - we owe him big time!
- Eric Raymond - wizard and philosoper
- Dave Winer- RSS
- Bill Gates - mad respect for this guy
- Bill Joy - vi!
- Guido Van Rossum - Python!
- Steve Wozniak - brilliant nerd hacker
Educators
- Albert Einstein - socialist and religious agnostic who hated school
- Stephen Hawking - what one believes is irrelevant in physics
- E.O. Wilson - single greatest influence on my love for science
- C.S. Lewis - my kind of theist
- J.R.R. Tolkien - best books ever written
Trouble Makers
- Copernicus - it’s not all about you
- Rosa Parks - no more!
- Martin Luther King Jr. - an extemist
- Charles Darwin - hey, what about this?
- Galileo - just telling it like I see it
- Mahatma Ghandi - Salt March
- Sam Adams - failed businessman turned instigator
Others
Aside from my parents, Thomas Jefferson has probably had the single greatest impact on my thinking. He doesn’t fit nicely into one of the three categories, but I couldn’t finish this post without mentioning him.
His views on slavery were complicated - at best - but I don’t want to derail this post discussing that. I have a future post planned that uses him and John Adams as examples, but I don’t plan to discuss that then either. I’ll add it to the list of ideas.