Surakarta, often called Solo and less commonly Sala, is a city in Central Java, Indonesia of more than 520,061 people (2009) with a population density of 11,811.5 people/km². The 44 km² city adjoins Karanganyar Regency and Boyolali Regency to the north, Karanganyar Regency and Sukoharjo Regency to the east and west, and Sukoharjo Regency to the south. On the eastern side of Solo lies Bengawan Solo River. The city is the seat of Surakarta Sunanate kraton (palace/court). Together with Yogyakarta, Surakarta is the heir of the Mataram Kingdom that was split into two kingdoms in 1755.

Surakarta is also widely known by the name "Solo". "Surakarta" is used in formal and official contexts. The city has a similar name to the neighboring district of "Kartasura," where the previous capital of Mataram was located. The variant spelling "Soerakarta" reflects the Dutch orthography in use before the 1948 spelling reform.

Its ruling family lay claim to being the heirs to the Mataram dynasty. Like Yogyakarta, Solo has two royal palaces.

Herman Thomas Karsten (22 April 1884, Amsterdam–1945, Cimahi) was a Dutch engineer who gave major contributions to architecture and town planning in Indonesia during Dutch colonial rule. Most significantly he integrated the practice of colonial urban environment with native elements; a radical approach to spatial planning for Indonesia at the time. He introduced a neighborhood plan for all ethnic groups in Semarang, built public markets in Yogyakarta and Surakarta, and a city square in the capital Batavia (now 'Jakarta'). Between 1915 and 1941 he was given responsibility for planning 12 out of 19 municipalities in Java, 3 out of 9 towns in Sumatra and a town in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). He received official recognition from both the government through his appointment to the colony's major Town Planning Committee and by the academic community with his appointment to the position of Lecturer for Town Planning at the School of Engineering at Bandung. He died in an internment camp near Bandung in 1945 during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia.

Joseph A. "Josh" Fisher is an American computer scientist. He is a Hewlett-Packard Senior Fellow. He worked at HP Labs from 1990 through 2006 in instruction-level parallelism and in custom embedded VLIW processors and their compilers. Fisher retired from active employment at HP in 2006.

Fisher studied at the Courant Institute of NYU (B.A., M.A., and then Ph.D. in 1979), where he devised the Trace Scheduling compiler algorithm and coined the term Instruction-level parallelism. As a professor at Yale University, he created and named VLIW Architectures and invented many of the fundamental technologies of ILP. In 1984, he started Multiflow Computer with two members of his Yale team. He won an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1984, was the 1987 Connecticut Eli Whitney Entrepreneur of the Year, and in 2003 received the ACM/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award. Fisher coauthored Embedded Computing: A VLIW Approach to Architectures, Compilers and Tools, published in 2005 by Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier.

Joko Widodo was born in Surakarta, June 21, 1961. Joko Widodo, better known by his nickname Jokowi, is the current mayor of Surakarta. His second term is due to end in 2015. His vice mayor is F.X. Hadi Rudyatmo. He was nominated by Indonesian Democratic Party – Struggle. Recently he has been chosen by his party to run in the 2012 Jakarta gubernatorial election.

Jokowi is an engineering graduate from the Faculty of Forestry at Gadjah Mada University in 1985.

When running for mayor, many doubted the ability of a man who works as a property and furniture businessman. But a year after he led, many progressive breakthrough he had made. He took the example of the development of many cities in Europe which he visited in the framework of frequent business travels.