At age 31, Stephen Schwarzman was Managing Director of Lehman Brothers, one of Wall Street's leading investment banking firms, but after merging Lehman with American Express, he chose to strike out on his own. With one partner, two employees and less than half a million in start-up cash,...

Kenneth Douglas Taylor was the Canadian Ambassador to Iran during the Iran hostage crisis and revolution in 1979. Iranian students invaded the United States embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979 (Iran hostage crisis). During the riot, six Americans managed to escape. They hid for four days...

When George F. Russell, Jr. joined his grandfather's brokerage and mutual fund company in 1958, it was a two-person operation. Two months later, his grandfather, Fran Russell died, and George found himself in charge of the struggling firm. In 1969, George Russell saw an opportunity to...

From a segregated elementary school in Alabama, Keith Black emerged as an award-winning scientific prodigy, practicing transplant surgery on laboratory animals and publishing his first scientific paper while still in his teens. In medical school, he discovered his life's passion, the human...

Stanley Crouch is a critic, novelist, social commentator and syndicated columnist. A onetime jazz drummer, he first became well-known for his writings on music and popular culture. Although he was originally associated with the avant-garde, he later become an outspoken champion of jazz...

Kathleen Magee and William Magee, M.D. are the founders of Operation Smile, a nonprofit organization that dispatches volunteer medical teams to developing countries to perform free corrective surgery on disfigured children. In the United States, many common birth defects are treated...

Elie Wiesel was only 15 when German troops deported him and his family from their home in Romania to the concentration camp, Auschwitz. His father, mother, and younger sister all died at the hands of the Nazis. The young boy survived forced labor, forced marches, starvation, disease,...

Prime F. Osborn III was the Founding Board Chairman of CSX Corporation, the nation's largest railroad system. He arrived at the University of Alabama in 1932 at the depth of the Great Depression, with 65 cents in his pocket. Osborn worked at the registrar's office and supplemented his...

Dr. Judah Folkman needed persistence. For 20 years his research in angiogenesis met with hostility and derision. Almost alone among researchers, Folkman believed the growth of cancer could be checked, and tumors eliminated, by depriving tumors of their blood supply, and that the blood...

Leon Lederman is the world's foremost experimental physicist, one of the very small group of thinkers who revolutionized our understanding of the subatomic world. In the late 1950s and early '60s, he participated in the discovery of the K-meson particle and the non-conservation of parity...

Eric Steven Lander is the founding director of the Broad Institute (a collaboration between MIT and Harvard) and director of its genome biology program. As one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project, Lander is exploring the molecular mechanisms underlying the basis of human...

General Robert Hilliard Barrow (February 5, 1922 – October 30, 2008) was the 27th Commandant of the United States Marine Corps from 1979 to 1983. He was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and grew up under difficult circumstances. The family home had no electricity, so Barrow satisfied an...

John H. McConnell (May 10, 1923 – April 25, 2008) was the founder and chairman of Worthington Industries, which manufactures processed steel products, pressure cylinders, and metal framing. He was also the founder and majority owner of the Columbus Blue Jackets NHL team. He left high...

When Robert Zemeckis was growing up on the South Side of Chicago, his hard-working parents saw his obsessive interest in moviemaking as a hobby, something to amuse the relatives at family gatherings. They were shocked by his decision to go to film school at the University of Southern...

Admiral Bobby Ray Inman is the former Director of the National Security Agency and former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. A Texan from a small town, he graduated with a degree in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 1950. Inman spent 28 years in the Navy...

John Hope Franklin (1915 - 2009) was a distinguished American historian. Author of more than dozen books, he is best known for his definitive history of the African American experience, From Slavery to Freedom. He was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, the son of an attorney and a...

Dr. Michael R. Harrison served as division chief in Pediatric Surgery at the Children’s Hospital at the University of California, San Francisco for more than twenty years, where he established the first Fetal Treatment Center in the United States. He graduated from Yale University with...

Chung Ju-yung (November 25, 1915 – March 21, 2001) was born into a large impoverished peasant family, but became a multi-billionaire and founder of Hyundai Group, at one time, the largest international conglomerate in South Korea. Hyundai was one of the largest engineering and construction...

A pioneer among women entrepreneurs, Lillian Vernon was the founder and longtime chairman of one of the nation's largest mail order businesses. Born in Germany, she and her parents came to America fleeing Nazi rule, and young Lillian learned her English watching movies. At 24, she was a...

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Richard Meier studied architecture at Cornell University, where he met the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright. Meier worked for the New York firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and then for the celebrated modern architect Marcel Breuer before starting his own...

Born and raised in a small town in rural Ireland, Edna O'Brien came to Dublin as a teenager to become a pharmacist, but a chance encounter with James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man helped her find her own voice as a writer. She completed her first novel, The Country Girls,...

Marvin Lee Minsky is the co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and Professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Minsky is heralded as the...

Peter Haas (1918 – 2005) was the chairman and CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., succeeding his father Walter A. Haas. The company was founded by his great-granduncle in 1850. Haas was the patriarch of the San Francisco family that controls Levi Strauss and spent the bulk of his 60-year career...

In 1988, Amy Tan was earning an excellent living writing speeches for business executives. She worked around the clock to meet the demands from her many high-priced clients, but she took no joy in the work, and felt frustrated and unfulfilled. In her mid-thirties, she took up writing...

William Julius Wilson is an award-winning sociologist and one of only 22 University Professors at Harvard University (the highest professional distinction for a Harvard faculty member). He is Past President of the American Sociological Association. Wilson has received 44 honorary degrees...

John Hendricks was a university fundraiser when he first conceived the idea for a cable television channel devoted to documentaries and educational programming. Borrowing against his home, he gathered $25 million from 30 individual investors and unveiled the Discovery Channel in 1985....

Larry Ellison is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Oracle Corporation, the world's leading enterprise software company. A billionaire many times over, Ellison is one of the world wealthiest individuals. In 2000, he was estimated to be the richest man in the world. He achieved...

Since 1994, the Honorable Stephen Breyer has been one of the nine Justices of the United States Supreme Court. An outstanding student and Eagle Scout from San Francisco, he graduated with honors from Stanford University and attended Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar. After earning...

As Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Daniel Goldin led the troubled space agency through a remarkable recovery, from the initial failure of the Hubble Space telescope, through the successful manned mission to repair the telescope, to subsequent...

Stephen D. Hassenfeld (1941 - 1989) was the Chairman and CEO of the Hasbro toy company from 1980 until his untimely death at age 47. He assumed the Presidency of the troubled firm on the death of his father in 1974 and turned the company around by reviving languishing brands such as Mr....

Gordon Randolph Willey (1913 - 2002) was an American archaeologist famous for his fieldwork in South and Central America as well as the southeastern United States. Regarded as one of the leading figures in 20th-century archaeology, Willey had a profound influence on the development and...

Sumner Redstone (born Sumner Murray Rothstein) is a media magnate who owns and controls the National Amusements theater chain, and is the majority owner of CBS Corporation, Viacom, the MTV Network, BET, and the Paramount Pictures film studio. Redstone attended the Boston Latin School,...

Hans Dehmelt received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 for his development of the ion trap technique, used for high precision measurement of the electron g-factor. Dehmelt was born in Germany. From his school days in Berlin, he was fascinated by radio technology. He began his university...

Hailed as "the flamboyant bad boy of post-modern architecture," Helmut Jahn emerged in the late 1960s as the most brilliant architect of his generation. Born in a farming village near Nuremberg, Germany, he graduated form the Technische Hochschule in Munich and then entered the Illinois...

The chemist Gertrude Elion (1918 -1999) was a trailblazer for women in American science, and the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Medicine. At an early age, her ambition to find new medicines led her to the study of chemistry, but when she graduated from college at age 19 in 1937, she...

Born Jean Marie Untinen in Chicago, she was the second of five children of a housepainter. Today, Jean Auel is a story-writing phenomenon whose series of novels set in prehistoric Europe have sold nearly 50 million copies worldwide. A grandmother of nine, she put in 12 years of night...

When President George H.W. Bush tapped Dr. Antonia Novello to be Surgeon General, she could hardly believe her ears. She was both the first woman and the first Latin American ever to serve as the nation's number one public health officer. She had come a long way from the little town...

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) grew up on the border of Montana and the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, and his writing was deeply shaped by the life and landscape of the mountain West. His first novel, Remembering Laughter, was published in 1937 when he was 28, and he continued writing...

The Honorable Robert M. Gates capped a distinguished career of public service with his five year term as Secretary of Defense, an unprecedented tenure that spanned the administration of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. An Eagle Scout and honors student form Kansas, Robert Gates...

One of the most distinguished musical artist of our time, the singer Jessye Norman was born in Augusta, Georgia. As a ten-year-old child, she was spellbound by a recording of the great contralto Marian Anderson. Inspired by Anderson's recordings and autobiography, she resolved to become a...

As Chairman and President of Safeway Inc., Peter A. Magowan engineered a turnaround that rescued the venerable grocery chain from a hostile takeover and restored it to profitability. He later enjoyed a successful 15-year run as General Managing Partner of the San Francisco Giants baseball...

The American businessman Robert Earl Holding is the longtime owner of Sinclair Oil, the Grand America and Westgate Hotel and Little America Hotels, and two ski resorts: Sun Valley, Idaho and Snowbasin in Ogden, Utah. Born in Salt Lake City, he was a child of the Depression who saw his...

The eminent historian and Russia scholar James H. Billington is the 13th person to serve as Librarian of the United States Congress. Valedictorian of his graduating class at Princeton University, he earned his doctorate in history as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. Following...

In recognition of Women's History Month, the Academy of Achievement presents a selection of extraordinary women who have defied expectations, broken boundaries, and made history around the world. They include courageous political leaders and human rights activists, recipients of the...

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was a pioneer in computer science, one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language. Hopper conceptualized the idea of machine-independent...

Bonnie Blair is one of the top skaters of her time and one of the most decorated athletes in Olympic history. She competed for the United States in four Olympics and won five gold medals. Blair was heralded in the media as “the 5’-4’’ Colossus on Skates.” As a cheerful, bright-eyed child,...

Judith Jamison is the Artistic Director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the best-known and most popular modern dance company in the United States. The daughter of a sheet metal worker and teacher, Jamison was sent to classical dance classes at the age of six. Jamison later...

In 1985, Thomas Sutherland was serving as Dean of Agriculture at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon. Four months into his term, he was pulled from his car at gunpoint and taken from the life he knew into a six-and-a-half-year hell of chains, beatings, isolation, cold, darkness and...

The molecular biologist Joan Steitz is famed for her discoveries involving RNA, one of the three major macromolecules essential for all known forms of life. Growing up in Minnesota, she was fascinated by biology but lacked female role models in the sciences. At Harvard, she was the first...

The pioneering biochemist Arthur Kornberg (1918 - 2007) was awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering the means by which DNA molecules are duplicated in the bacterial cell -- landmark research that helped advance our understanding of the hereditary process. He was also...