Andrew Stephen ("Andy") Grove (born 2 Sept 1936), is a Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, and author. He is a science pioneer in the semiconductor industry. He escaped from Communist-controlled Hungary at the age of 20 and moved to the U.S., where he finished his education. He later became CEO of Intel Corporation and helped transform the company into the world's largest manufacturer of semiconductors.

In 1968, along with colleagues Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, Grove co-founded Intel after the three left Fairchild Semiconductor. He became the start-up company's chief operating officer (COO), where he directed all management functions, and in 1987 became its chief executive officer (CEO). During his tenure as CEO, Grove oversaw an increase in Intel's stock value by 2,400%, making it one of the world's most valuable companies. With Grove managing development and promotion of Intel's microprocessors, they would, in the 1980s, be used to power all IBM PCs as well as those of IBM's competitors.

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American software engineer, businessman and the current executive chairman of Google. From 2001 to 2011, he served as the chief executive of Google.

Additionally, Schmidt was a former member on the board of directors for Apple Inc. and sat on the boards of trustees for both Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University.

Along with Mike Lesk, Schmidt co-authored the lex analysis software program for the Unix computer operating system.

Schmidt was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. After graduating from Yorktown High School, Schmidt attended Princeton University where he earned a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1976. At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned an MS in 1979 for designing and implementing a network linking the campus computer center, the CS and the EECS departments, and a PhD in 1982 in EECS with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems. He was joint author of lex (a lexical analyzer and an important tool for compiler construction). He taught at Stanford Graduate School of Business as a part time professor.

Charles Peete "Charlie" Rose, Jr. (born January 5, 1942) is an American television talk show host and journalist. Since 1991 he has hosted Charlie Rose, an interview show distributed nationally by PBS since 1993. He has also co-anchored CBS This Morning since January 2012. Rose, along with Lara Logan, has hosted the revived CBS classic Person to Person, a news program during which celebrities are interviewed in their homes, originally hosted from 1953 to 1961 by Edward R. Murrow.

Rose was born in Henderson, North Carolina, the only child of Margaret Frazier and Charles Peete Rose, Sr., tobacco farmers who owned a country store. As a child, Rose lived above his parents' store in Henderson and helped out with the family business from age seven. Rose admitted in a Fresh Dialogues interview that as a child his insatiable curiosity was constantly getting him in trouble. A high school basketball star, Rose entered Duke University intending to pursue a degree with a pre-med track, but an internship in the office of Democratic North Carolina Senator B. Everett Jordan got him interested in politics. Rose graduated in 1964 with a bachelor's degree in history. At Duke, he was a member of the Kappa Alpha Order fraternity. He earned a Juris Doctor from the Duke University School of Law in 1968. He met his wife, Mary (née King), while attending Duke.

Jack St. Clair Kilby (November 8, 1923 – June 20, 2005) was an American physicist who took part (along with Robert Noyce) in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments (TI) in 1958. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2000. He is also the inventor of the handheld calculator and the thermal printer.

Born in Jefferson City, Missouri, Kilby grew up and attended school in Great Bend, Kansas, graduating from Great Bend High School. Road signs at the entrances to the town commemorate his time there, and the Commons Area at Great Bend High School has been named The Jack Kilby Commons Area.

Kilby received his bachelor of science degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is an honorary member of Acacia Fraternity. In 1947, he received a degree in Electrical Engineering. He obtained his master of science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Extension in Milwaukee, which later became the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1950, while simultaneously working at Centralab in Milwaukee.