Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and developer of Metcalfe's Law regarding the value of a network, enjoys camping on Maine Island, his children's sport events, and biking. With both seriousness and a sense of humor, he notes his ways of giving to society as being a trustee for MIT and by paying taxes.
"I spend time with my wife and son," says Jim Williams, designer of hundreds of fundamental application circuits who perfected the art of getting the maximum performance from high-performance amplifiers and data converters. "It really doesn't make any difference what we do, although skiing is more fun than taking out the garbage together!" Williams squeezes in some reading time into his hectic schedule. "I love to read The New Yorker magazine to see what's going on in the real world. That's the only fiction I read because the writing is so good." He also supports medical programs, especially cancer research.
Outdoor activities are a favorite of John Birkner, co-developer of programmable-array logic technology. "I've had a great summer visiting friends and relatives, being on Mount Shasta in northern California. It's a mountain wonderland with lots of lakes and (snow) skiing. In the summer I enjoy kayaking on the lakes and streams during overnight campouts," he says. He's also enjoyed seeing Crater Lake in Oregon.
This fall is a bittersweet one for him: He's just sent his daughter off to college. Birkner was heavily involved with a very successful fundraising project for her school this year. He created an online auction Web site. "We made a small Ebay and got parents and students and small businesses to donate items. We raised lots of funds for the school," he says. It raised enough money to buy 25 computers for the school and support other programs. He's gearing up to have another auction this year and also is getting requests for a similar program from other schools. "I'm thinking of making it a non-profit product to assist schools in fundraising," says Birkner.
Music plays an important part in the lives of many inductees, too. It's not unusual for Jeff Kodosky, co-inventor of LabVIEW and co-founder of National Instruments, to have 60 guests in his home for a fundraising concert. These concerts benefit musical organizations from chamber music to classical guitar.
Kodosky actually enjoys a variety of performing arts productions—ballet, symphony, opera, the Houston Grand Opera, and the NY Metropolitan Opera. A personal favorite is a local choral group called Conspirare. "It means 'to breathe together.' It's an exquisite choral group," says Kodosky.
That love of music has Kodosky serving on the boards of several performing arts groups: Austin Lyric Opera, Armstrong Community Music School, and Austin Community Foundation, which donates to community-based arts, cultural, and health organizations in Austin and central Texas. "As part of that, we make visits to charities. It's a very moving experience to see the effect these people are having, even though they are usually working on a shoe-string budget," says Kodosky.
Another love of Kodosky's is education. He's involved in several non-profit education-based organizations, including the board of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in N.Y., College of Natural Science at University of Texas, and the advisory board for MathWorks. "My favorite project in education is UTeach. It's a teacher training program in natural sciences at UT Austin. It has been phenomenally successful. It's probably the first of its kind for teacher training for middle- and high-school science and math teachers," says Kodosky. It lets undergraduates teach in a high-school classroom what they just learned about supply chains and math at the college level. "It lets them try out teaching and see what it is like. We're finding the best and brightest students are getting enthused and their test scores are higher. By all measures, the program has exceeded our expectations. More than 300 students are in the program this semester. Still, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the need for such teachers."
Having two daughters, Kodosky and his wife also support other charities like Girl Scouts and Girl Start. The latter is a local program to promote science to secondary-age girls, encouraging them in the science and technology fields. His younger daughter accepted that challenge and is studying for a master's degree in neurobiology with plans to enter veterinary school. The older daughter has given Kodosky another leisure activity: entertaining two grandchildren with reading, walks, and doing puzzles. "We have a grand old time,"says Kodosky.
Writing music and poetry are Barrie Gilbert's relaxation choices. "I like to rearrange sonatas for orchestra or wind ensemble. I have a studio with a dozen synthesizers. I write music for a virtual orchestra."As a 60th birthday present, his wife upgraded the grand piano she'd given him years back as a wedding present. The new one lets him record to a medium and play it back, so he writes the music upstairs and takes a floppy downstairs to hear it on his grand piano.
"I like quite a bit of modern music, but it has to have some substance, something I can get my teeth into. So much of modern is wallpaper. It doesn't mean a thing. What attracts me most is classical. Haydn is full of wit and is clever. Mozart really is not serious. A lot of it was scatological," he says. Domenico Scarlatti and his 500 harpsichord pieces are favorites. "It's very, very witty stuff. It's pure pleasure."
Writing music is similar to designing circuits, says Gilbert. Each has a pattern and purpose with movement toward a high point of tension. The last Beethoven sonata sheet music, he says, is "extraordinarily simple. He takes this theme and develops it into profound, moving music. Similarly, good circuit design appears to be very simple and obvious, but it is a distillation of painstaking thought, clipping of things that don't matter, and clever use of topologies to do a major function with minimum movements."
"Music is about the human condition," he says. "In all good music, there is a reason for it. It's an expression of us, and likewise technology is a reflection of the human spirit, of how we as humans develop our environment different from the animal world. Technology is about serving a human need."
And that is poetry.