Everything about Charles Simonyi totally explained
Charles Simonyi (; born
September 10,
1948,
Budapest) is a
computer software executive who, as head of
Microsoft's application software group, oversaw the creation of Microsoft's flagship
office applications. He now heads his own company,
Intentional Software.
Biography
Simonyi was born in
Budapest,
Hungary, the son of Károly Simonyi, a professor of electrical engineering at
Technical University of Budapest. While in
high school he worked part-time as a night watchman at a computer laboratory, overseeing a large Soviet
Ural II mainframe. He took an interest in computing and learned to program from one of the laboratory's engineers. By the time he left school, he'd learned to develop
compilers and sold one of these to a government department. He was hired by
Denmark's
A/S Regnecentralen in 1966 and moved to the
United States in 1968 to attend the
University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his
B.S. in Engineering Mathematics, specializing in Mathematics and Statistics, in 1972.
Simonyi then went to
Stanford University Simonyi introduced the techniques of
object-oriented programming that he'd learned at Xerox to Microsoft and developed the
Hungarian notation convention for naming variables that has been widely adopted.
Simonyi remained at Microsoft during its meteoric rise in the software industry, becoming one of its highest-ranking developers. He left abruptly in 2002 to co-found, with business partner
Gregor Kiczales, a company called Intentional Software. This company markets the
intentional programming concepts Simonyi developed at Microsoft Research. In this approach to software, a programmer first builds a toolbox specific to a given problem domain (such as life insurance). Domain experts, aided by the programmer, then describe the program's intended behavior in a
WYSIWYG-like manner. An automated system uses the program description and the toolbox to generate the final program. Successive changes are only done at the WYSIWYG level.
In 2004, Simonyi received the
Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award for the industry-wide impact of his innovative work in information technology.
Simonyi has been an active philanthropist. In 1995 he established an endowed chair for the
Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at
Oxford University, the first and current occupant of which is
Richard Dawkins. He also established a
Charles Simonyi Professor for Innovation in Teaching endowed chair at
Stanford University. In January 2004, Simonyi created the $50 million
Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences, through which Simonyi plans to support Seattle-area arts, science, and educational programs. Initial grant recipients include the
Seattle Symphony ($10 million), and the
Seattle Public Library ($3 million). In 2005, the Fund donated $25 million to the
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey.
Personal life
As of February 2008 Simonyi has been dating
Martha Stewart for 14 years.
Simonyi is the owner of the purpose-built
super yacht named
Skat.
Simonyi's residence in
Medina, Washington, "Villa Simonyi", is a modern house designed by architect
Wendell Lovett, where Simonyi displays his collection of paintings by
Roy Lichtenstein and
Victor Vasarely.
Space tourist
In early 2006, Simonyi expressed interest in becoming a
space tourist and signed agreements with the space tourism company,
Space Adventures, Ltd., for a ten-day mission to the
International Space Station (ISS).
In August 2006, he passed a pre-qualification medical exam by the Russian Federal Space Agency, called the State Medical Commission (GMK). He started training at
Star City in September 2006. on board
Soyuz TMA-10. He shared a ride with two Russian cosmonauts to the ISS, and returned aboard
Soyuz TMA-9, scheduled to depart from the ISS on
April 20,
2007.
Upon arrival to the ISS on
April 9,
2007 Simonyi said, "It is amazing how it appears from the blackness of the sky. It was very, very dramatic. It was like a big stage set, a fantastic production of some incredible opera or modern play. That's what I was referring to when I said I was blown away."
Simonyi's expected return on
April 20 was delayed by one day due to 'boggy ground'. He returned to Earth on April 21 along with an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut.
Radio communication while aboard ISS
Charles Simonyi is a licensed
amateur radio operator with the
call sign KE7KDP, and planned to contact a number of schools while on his flight on the International Space Station utilizing
amateur radio for the communication with those schools. On
April 11,
2007 the
American Radio Relay League reported that Simonyi was already making ham radio contacts from space.
One of the schools Simonyi contacted was
Cedar Point Elementary in
Bristow,
Virginia. A telebridge conversation was held on Tuesday,
April 17 2007. Onboard with him were Oleg Kotov and Fyodor Yurchikhin.
Simonyi used his Hungarian call sign HA5SIK
(External Link
) when he contacted 25 radio amateurs from Hungary in a record attempt on
April 12. He contacted former and current students of
Tivadar Puskás Polytechnic,
Budapest on
April 13.
Further Information
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