During our history classes, we all learned about George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Albert Einstein. These influential people played an essential role in shaping our world. Nonetheless, we have geniuses of our own today.
Earth is full of inspiring people, with geeks probably being the most exciting group of them all. One look at Bill Gates’ net worth should be all you need to understand their importance for our current societies. Nevertheless, Microsoft’s founder is only one name from the long list of famous geeks. If you would like to know more about some of them, you came to the right place. Here are a few more geek individuals you should know about:
Jimmy Wales
This information technology whiz is the man behind Wikipedia. The famous site was created in 2001, and it has been an important source of information on all aspects of human knowledge since then. As you might already know, Wikipedia can provide you with virtually any piece of information you might need. The website is valuable and reliable, which is why Jimmy Wales deserves to be added to our list of famous geeks.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk is a fascinating person. He is one of the most influential people in the world today, being worth over $20 billion. This South African engineer turned entrepreneur is the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors and PayPal. His intellectual properties are impressive, but his ability to innovate should make him a role model for every aspiring computer engineer or entrepreneur out there. And yes, he is also a huge geek.
Steve Wozniak
Future geeks would have never achieved their current status without Steve Wozniak’s contributions to computers and the world of technology at large. This California-born engineer co-founded Apple Computer with his old friend Steve Jobs in 1976. It is not hard to imagine that both of them would never have made it to the list of famous geeks without each other’s help.
Bill Gates
Bill Gates could be considered the father of modern geeks. This Seattle-born man revolutionized the computer industry by creating Microsoft in 1975. His company was able to create the most popular operating system ever in history, which is Windows OS. If we ever tried to list all of his achievements, we would probably run out of paper for our printer. Needless to say, this awesome geek deserves all the credit he gets.
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most recognizable names on this list of famous geeks. This young man created one of the most popular social networks ever – Facebook – which has around 2.8 billion active users and $874 billion in market cap at the time of writing this article. Entrepreneurs would love to have such influence over their customers, while geeks would love to have such wealth.
Gordon Moore
Gordon Moore changed our world forever when he wrote an article for Electronics magazine in 1965, where he predicted that computer chips would double in power and halve in cost every 18 months or so. This prediction became commonly known as Moore’s Law, which was later modified to every two years or so but soon became obsolete as technologies advanced even more rapidly than that. Nevertheless, Moore’s insights are invaluable to this day, and his name deserves to be mentioned among the famous tech geeks of our times.
Tim Berners-Lee
Although most people associate Tim Berners-Lee with the World Wide Web (WWW), he was responsible for many other things as well. In fact, he also popularized the concept of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Uniform Resource Locator (URL). His work is priceless and needs to be appreciated by everyone who uses modern technologies on a regular basis.
Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden is undoubtedly one of the most famous geeks in recent years. He broke numerous rules back when he released classified documents about NSA surveillance programs, which showed how easy it was for intelligence agencies to spy on ordinary citizens worldwide. Thanks to Snowden’s actions, we learned about the dangers posed by big corporations and governments all around the world. In fact, his actions were so brave that he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for exposing government secrets. He is still considered a traitor in the United States, though.
The Bottom Line
If there is one thing we can learn from such a list, it is that it pays to be a geek. It is fun to think that the eight successful people we mentioned above went through many years of mocking. Well, who is laughing now?
All these gentlemen had a massive impact on our world, and it is hard to imagine how our lives would have looked like without their achievements. That is why if you are a geek as well, do not be ashamed of it. Embrace the fact you are not like other people. That is what some of the most successful people on the planet did, and look where they are now.
