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From Russell Ohl noticing a cracked silicon ingot in 1940 to the founders of today's frontier labs.
Invented the point-contact transistor at Bell Labs in December 1947.
Co-invented the transistor; founded Shockley Semiconductor in 1955.
Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Sheldon Roberts.
Invented the planar process in 1959, the foundation of modern IC manufacturing.
Co-invented the monolithic integrated circuit; co-founded Intel.
Invented the MOSFET at Bell Labs in 1959.
Formulated Moore's Law in Electronics magazine on April 19, 1965.
Formulated Amdahl's Law in 1967; attempted wafer-scale integration with Trilogy Systems in 1980.
Pioneered venture capital; financed Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel.
Caltech professor who coined "Moore's Law" and built the foundations of VLSI and neuromorphic computing.
Co-authored "Introduction to VLSI Systems" (1980), the textbook that opened chip design to a generation.
Hungarian refugee, third employee of Intel, the CEO who taught the industry what operational discipline looks like.
Founded TSMC in 1987, inventing the pure-play foundry model.
Co-pioneered RISC architecture; established codesign as the dominant mental model in modern computing.
Co-founded Nvidia in 1993; the CEO who turned graphics chips into AI accelerators and extended codesign across the entire stack.
Cognitive psychologist and computer scientist who kept neural networks alive through the AI winter.
Invented convolutional neural networks; Meta Chief AI Scientist.
Université de Montréal professor; co-founded the modern deep-learning revival.
Co-author of AlexNet; co-founder of OpenAI; founder of Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Co-founded Anthropic in 2021; author of the 'Machines of Loving Grace' essay.
CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.
Co-founded DeepMind in 2010; CEO of Google DeepMind.
Co-founded OpenAI; led Tesla autopilot vision; now Eureka Labs and prolific educator.
Returned to Intel as CEO in 2021 to restart its leading-edge roadmap; now on xLight's board attacking the cost of EUV from first principles.
Every profile anchors to a load-bearing first principle the rest of Peregrinations depends on. We are not building a Wikipedia mirror; the question for each entry is “what does the reader gain by understanding this person that they would not gain by reading the article without them.”
The roster is incomplete and growing. Figures pending the next research pass include Federico Faggin (4004 architect), Lisa Su (AMD CEO), Pat Gelsinger (Intel CEO 2021-2024), Jeff Dean (Google AI lead), Fei-Fei Li (ImageNet, vision), John McCarthy (LISP, term “AI”), Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and others.