My Influencers

Allama Mashriqi, my grandfather, was a prominent scholar and influential thinker who aimed to unify natural and social sciences. His quest for unity in knowledge led him to Europe in 1926, where he met Albert Einstein. Their extended discussions centered around the importance of bridging the gap between the study of the physical world and the living world.

In his book “The Disowned Genius,” Syed Shabbir Hussain wrote that Allama Mashriqi advised Einstein to look beyond the study of the dead matter and delve into the study of life. He believed that doing so would put mankind on a new path towards a holistic understanding of the universe.

Unfortunately, Einstein faced difficulties in his pursuit of knowledge, as he was forced to leave Germany due to Hitler’s oppressive regime. This lack of support from his government highlights the importance of providing a conducive environment for intellectual growth and the opportunity cost of not doing so.

Other influential people in my life and research are:

Physicists:

1. Albert Einstein
2. Isaac Newton
3. Niels Bohr
4. Werner Heisenberg
5. Richard Feynman
6. Stephen Hawking
7. Brian Greene
8. Lisa Randall
9. Sean Carroll
10. Carlo Rovelli

Economists:

1. Adam Smith
2. John Maynard Keynes
3. Milton Friedman
4. Paul Krugman
5. Amartya Sen
6. Joseph Stiglitz
7. Thomas Piketty
8. Esther Duflo
9. Abhijit Banerjee
10. Dani Rodrik

Sociologists:

1. Émile Durkheim
2. Max Weber
3. Karl Marx
4. Erving Goffman
5. Pierre Bourdieu
6. Anthony Giddens
7. Zygmunt Bauman
8. Michel Foucault
9. Judith Butler
10. Saskia Sassen

Neurologists:

1. Sigmund Freud
2. Wilder Penfield
3. Oliver Sacks
4. V.S. Ramachandran
5. Antonio Damasio
6. Eric Kandel
7. Daniel Levitin
8. David Eagleman
9. Norman Doidge
10. Lisa Feldman Barrett

Computer Scientists:

1. Alan Turing
2. John von Neumann
3. Grace Hopper
4. Donald Knuth
5. Edsger Dijkstra
6. Tim Berners-Lee
7. Larry Page & Sergey Brin
8. Ada Lovelace
9. Andrew Ng
10. Geoffrey Hinton

Programmers/Developers:

1. Linus Torvalds
2. Guido van Rossum
3. Bjarne Stroustrup
4. James Gosling
5. Brendan Eich
6. Brian Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie
7. John Carmack
8. David Heinemeier Hansson
9. Yukihiro Matsumoto
10. Kent Beck

Data Scientists:

1. Hadley Wickham
2. Yann LeCun
3. Fei-Fei Li
4. Hilary Mason
5. Daphne Koller
6. Yoshua Bengio
7. Alex “Sandy” Pentland
8. Jeremey Howard
9. DJ Patil
10. Monica Rogati

Innovators:

1. Elon Musk
2. Steve Jobs
3. Bill Gates
4. Jeff Bezos
5. Larry Ellison
6. Sheryl Sandberg
7. Reid Hoffman
8. Richard Branson
9. Marissa Mayer
10. Mark Zuckerberg

Professors:

1. Noam Chomsky
2. Steven Pinker
3. Yuval Noah Harari
4. Robert Sapolsky
5. Peter Singer
6. Judith Jarvis Thomson
7. Jared Diamond
8. Paul Romer
9. Clayton Christensen
10. Carol Dweck