Grinnell College

Herbert Jeffrey "Herbie" Hancock is an American pianist, keyboardist, bandleader and composer. As part of Miles Davis's Second Great Quintet,... Hancock helped to redefine the role of a jazz rhythm section and was one of the primary architects of the "post-bop" sound. He was one of the first jazz musicians to embrace music synthesizers and funk music . Hancock's music is often melodic and accessible; he has had many songs "cross over" and achieved success among pop audiences. His music embraces elements of funk and soul while adopting freer stylistic elements from jazz. In his jazz improvisation, he possesses a unique creative blend of jazz, blues, and modern classical music, with harmonic stylings much like the styles of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Hancock's best-known solo works include "Cantaloupe Island", "Watermelon Man" , "Maiden Voyage", "Chameleon", and the singles "I Thought It Was You" and "Rockit".
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Thomas Robert Cech is a chemist who shared the 1989 Nobel prize in chemistry with Sidney Altman, for their discovery of the catalytic properties of... RNA. Cech discovered that RNA could itself cut strands of RNA, which showed that life could have started as RNA. He also studied telomeres, and his lab discovered an enzyme, TERT , which is part of the process of restoring telomeres after they are shortened during cell division. As president of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he promoted science education, and he teaches an undergraduate chemistry course at the University of Colorado. Cech was born to parents of Czech origin in Chicago, he grew up in Iowa City, Iowa. In junior high school, he knocked on the doors of geology professors at the University of Iowa, and asked them to discuss crystal structures, meteorites and fossils. In 1966, he entered Grinnell College where he studied Homer's Odyssey, Dante's Inferno, constitutional history and chemistry.
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Robert Norton Noyce , nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. He is also... credited with the invention of the integrated circuit or microchip which fueled the personal computer revolution and gave Silicon Valley its name. Active all his life, Noyce enjoyed reading Hemingway, flying his own airplane, hang gliding, and scuba diving. Noyce believed that microelectronics would continue to advance in complexity and sophistication well beyond its current state, leading to the question of what use society would make of the technology. In his last interview, Noyce was asked what he would do if he were "emperor" of the United States. He said that he would, among other things, "…make sure we are preparing our next generation to flourish in a high-tech age. And that means education of the lowest and the poorest, as well as at the graduate school level." Noyce was born on December 12, 1927, in Burlington, Iowa. He was the third of four sons of the Rev. Ralph Brewster Noyce.
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