Gordon E. Moore is the retired chairman and CEO of Intel Corporation. Moore co-founded Intel in 1968, serving initially as executive vice president. He became president and CEO in 1975 and held that post until elected chairman and CEO in 1979. He remained CEO until 1987 and was named chairman emeritus in 1997. Moore is widely known for "Moore's Law," in which in 1965 he predicted that the number of components the industry would be able to place on a computer chip would double every year. In 1975, he updated his prediction to once every two years. It has become the guiding principle for the semiconductor industry to deliver ever-more-powerful chips while decreasing the cost of electronics. Moore earned a bachelor's in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1950 and a Ph.D. in chemistry and physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1954. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Engineers. Moore also served on the board of trustees of the California Institute of Technology. He received the National Medal of Technology in 1990 and the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2002.

Carver A. Mead, Caltech’s Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, Emeritus, began teaching at the Institute in 1958 and was appointed assistant professor in 1959, before even receiving his PhD.An author/educator known internationally for his pioneering work in solid-state electronics and the management of complexity in the design of very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuits, Mead has written and contributed to over 100 publications and holds numerous patents. He has written, with Lynn Conway, the standard text for VLSI design, Introduction to VLSI Systems. In 1989 he authored Analog VLSI and Neural Systems. While his later work emphasized the construction of silicon models of neural systems, his current focus is on a new approach to the standard problems of electromagnetic theory, and he has most recently published Collective Electrodynamics.Mead has founded more than 20 companies, his newest being Foveon, which produces a high-end digital camera that captures electronic images with the quality of analog film.A fellow of the American Physical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Mead is a foreign fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, a life fellow of the Franklin Institute, and a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.His many honors include the National Medal of Technology, the John von Neumann Medal, the National Academy of Engineering’s Founders Award, the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, and honorary doctorates from the University of Lund and USC.