Emmy Noether

The Mighty Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of

Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries were inclined to drop the modification by sex. She invented a theorem that united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation. Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today’s vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almighty Higgs boson. ....... a brilliant theorist whose unshakable number love and irrationally robust sense of humor helped her overcome severe handicaps — first, being female in Germany at a time when most German universities didn’t accept female students or hire female professors, and then being a Jewish pacifist in the midst of the Nazis’ rise to power. ...... Through it all, Noether was a highly prolific mathematician, publishing groundbreaking papers, sometimes under a man’s name, in rarefied fields of abstract algebra and ring theory. And when she applied her equations to the universe around her, she discovered some of its basic rules,

like how time and energy are related

, and why it is, as the physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute put it, “that riding a bicycle is safe.” ........ “You can make a strong case that her theorem is the backbone on which all of modern physics is built.” .... Noether came from a mathematical family. Her father was a distinguished math professor at the universities of Heidelberg and Erlangen, and her brother Fritz won some renown as an applied mathematician. Emmy, as she was known throughout her life, started out studying English, French and piano — subjects more socially acceptable for a girl — but her interests soon turned to math. Barred from matriculating formally at the University of Erlangen, Emmy simply audited all the courses, and she ended up doing so well on her final exams that she was granted the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree. ....... earned her doctorate summa cum laude ..... In 1915 Einstein published his general theory of relativity. The Göttingen math department fell “head over ear” with it, in the words of one observer, and Noether began applying her invariance work to some of the complexities of the theory. That exercise eventually inspired her to formulate what is now called Noether’s theorem, an expression of the deep tie between the underlying geometry of the universe and the behavior of the mass and energy that call the universe home. ........ Wherever you find some sort of symmetry in nature, some predictability or homogeneity of parts, you’ll find lurking in the background a corresponding conservation — of momentum, electric charge, energy or the like. If a bicycle wheel is radially symmetric, if you can spin it on its axis and it still looks the same in all directions, well, then, that symmetric translation must yield a corresponding conservation. By applying the principles and calculations embodied in Noether’s theorem, you’ll see that it is angular momentum, the Newtonian impulse that keeps bicyclists upright and on the move. ..........

Some of the relationships to pop out of the theorem are startling, the most profound one linking time and energy.

Noether’s theorem shows that a symmetry of time — like the fact that whether you throw a ball in the air tomorrow or make the same toss next week will have no effect on the ball’s trajectory — is directly related to the conservation of energy, our old homily that energy can be neither created nor destroyed but merely changes form. ........ “Energy, momentum and other quantities we take for granted gain meaning and even greater value when we understand how these quantities follow from symmetry in time and space.” ...... After meeting the young Czech math star Olga Taussky in 1930, Noether told friends how happy she was that women were finally gaining acceptance in the field, but she herself had so few female students that her many devoted pupils were known around town as Noether’s boys. ...... Noether lived for math and cared nothing for housework or possessions, and if her long, unruly hair began falling from its pins as she talked excitedly about math, she let it fall. She laughed often and in photos is always smiling. .......

When a couple of students started showing up to class wearing Hitler’s brownshirts, she laughed at that, too.

..... In 1933, with the help of Einstein, she was given a job

at Bryn Mawr College, where she said she felt deeply appreciated as she never had been in Germany.

Emmy Noether Google Doodle: Why Einstein called her a ‘creative mathematical genius’

Noether had risen against wall after wall of obstacles to work on such areas as ring theory; now she was counted among those in a most rarefied academic circle...... “Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. One seeks the most general ideas of operation which will bring together in simple, logical and unified form the largest possible circle of formal relationships. In this effort toward logical beauty spiritual formulas are discovered necessary for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature.” –A.E. ........ Noether studied French and English as a girl growing up in Bavaria, but upon reaching adulthood, she followed her father (Max Noether) and a brother (Fritz) into math, and it was there she discovered and gave her full expression to the poetry of logical ideas. ........ Einstein called her two years at Pennsylvania’s Bryn Mawr “the happiest and perhaps the most fruitful of her entire career.” ..... “There weren’t any obstacles that would stop Noether from her studies. In this doodle, each circle symbolizes a branch of math or physics that Noether devoted her illustrious career to. From left to right, you can see topology (the donut and coffee mug), ascending/descending chains, Noetherian rings (represented in the doodle by the Lasker-Noether theorem), time, group theory, conservation of angular momentum, and continuous symmetries — and the list keeps going on and on from there! Noether’s advancements not only reflect her brilliance but also her determination in the face of adversity.”

The female mathematician who changed the course of physics—but couldn’t get a job

Noether's Theorem may be the most important theoretical result in modern physics. ...... Göttingen served as the center of mathematics for the Western world by this point, and Hilbert stood as one of its most notorious thinkers. He was a prominent leader for the minority of mathematicians who preferred a symbolic, axiomatic development in contrast to a more concrete style that emphasized the construction of particular solutions. Many of his peers recoiled from these modern methods, one even calling them “theology.” But Hilbert eventually won over most critics through the power and fruitfulness of his research. ......... Her father, Max, was a fairly prominent mathematician, and one of her brothers eventually attained a doctorate in math. In retrospect, perhaps the Noethers may be another historical example of a family with a math gene. ..... she had a facility with languages and was allowed to become certified as a language teacher. But Noether recognized her passion was in mathematics, and she decided to chase her dream and find a way to study the subject at the university level. ...... She also vigorously attacked her own research, forging a personal and original path through abstract algebra. Just a year after her doctorate, Noether's papers and the doctoral research that she was unofficially supervising gained her election to several academic societies, which prompted invitations to speak around Europe. Among those wanting her around, Hilbert reached out to bring Noether to Göttingen in order to tackle Einstein’s theory. ........

Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity was undoubtedly beautiful. It was unlike any theory of nature yet imagined by humankind

...... The mass that determined the strength of the gravitational force was the same mass that appeared in Newton’s second law of motion, F = ma; gravitational mass was the same as the “inertial mass.” There was no apparent reason this had to be true, it simply was. ....... but Hilbert could not overcome the resistance of the humanities professors, who simply could not stomach the idea of a female teacher. ...... Noether immediately grasped the problem with Einstein's theory. Over the course of three years, she not only solved it, but in doing so she proved a theorem that simultaneously reached back to the dawn of physics and pushed forward to the physics of today.

Noether’s Theorem

, as it is now called, lies at the heart of modern physics, unifying everything from the orbits of planets to the theories of elementary particles........ the theorem uncovers a hidden relationship between symmetry and conservation, and that relationship is what came to unify all of physics. ....... If the equations that describe the universe changed as time passed, we could never make sense of anything. ..... Physics should be the same no matter where in space we are, if nothing else changes. The equations of motion need to be the same in New York or Göttingen. ....... Noether’s Theorem relates continuous invariants to conservation laws. A conservation law is a rule that says that some quantity remains numerically constant as the system evolves in time. Conservation of energy, momentum, and angular momentum from classical physics are famous examples. ....... conservation of energy was not discovered for almost 200 years after Newton published his laws of motion. ........

Noether’s Theorem proves that for every invariant, there is a corresponding conservation law. She also proved the converse, meaning that for every conservation law there must be an invariant behind it.

...... The theorem shows that conservation of energy is equivalent to time invariance in classical physics. This hard-won yet essential conservation law is directly implied by, and implies, a fundamental symmetry of nature. It shows that momentum conservation is equivalent to spatial invariance. It establishes the equivalence of other symmetries, more mathematical in flavor, with other conservation laws. For example, the conservation of charge is related to a gauge symmetry, a complex mathematical symmetry in the equations of electrodynamics. ...... It is the theorem’s power to derive new conservation laws from abstract symmetries that has guided physical theory up to the present day. Noether’s result is an important tool in contemporary areas like particle physics, and it’s likely to remain so. ........ Noether’s work helped shed light on the fact that Einstein’s gravity behaves as no theory devised before, in that the energy of matter moving in a gravitational field can not be considered separately from the energy of the field itself. There is a conservation law, but it involves taking all of matter and gravity in a region of space as a unified whole .......... Noether showed that Hilbert was correct­—normal local energy conservation did not hold in Einstein’s work. However, she discovered that this was because of the peculiar kind of symmetry in general relativity. In this radically new model of the universe, gravity altered the very geometry of space and time.

In a Euclidean world, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter equals π. But in Einstein’s universe, this ratio depends on where in space you happen to be.

.......... energy conservation in general relativity just could not take the form that it had in all previous physics theories. ..... classroom teaching wasn’t her strength, Noether proved to be a superb leader of small research groups. Her advanced students were devoted to her. .......

One-third of the mathematics professors, and three-fourths of the heads of Göttingen’s mathematics and physics institutes, were Jewish despite less than one percent of the German population identifying that way at the time.

....... Noether’s work seemed to unify the most abstract mathematics with the most basic physical intuition, unifying the earliest successful systems of physics with science yet unborn. The circumstances of her life provide a powerful example of the humanizing influence of science and mathematics. It was the exponents of these fields who were eager to welcome her into their fellowship without regard for her sex or ancestry; the men of philosophy, history, politics, and government sought to exclude her for these very reasons. ....... A street and school in her home town have been named after her, as well as a crater on the moon. And for her birthday on March 23, Google dedicated its coveted Doodle real estate to one of history's most under-appreciated minds.

Stephen Hawking Interviewed By A Comedian

He is the closest thing to Einstein we have!

Einstein In An Infographic

Source: How Einstein Started

Time Travel

Interstellar

Time travel is easier than you think

The crux of all of the methods is that space and time are actually one big thing called space-time, meaning you can manipulate your position in time by changing how you move through space. The speed you are traveling and your distance from the earth both affect how fast you travel through time: If you stand up, for example, your feet age 10 femtoseconds less than your head. And then there are wormholes and infinitely large spinning cylinders.

Stephen Hawking: Space and Time Warps

today's science fiction, is often tomorrow's science fact. .... For more than two thousand years, the axioms of Euclidean geometry, were considered to be self evident. As those of you that were forced to learn Euclidean geometry at school may remember, one of the consequences of these axioms is, that the angles of a triangle, add up to a hundred and 80 degrees. ........ in the last century, people began to realize that other forms of geometry were possible, in which the angles of a triangle, need not add up to a hundred and 80 degrees. ...... so one could imagine that the three dimensional space in which we live, was the surface of a sphere, in another dimension that we don't see. ..... one can not deduce the geometry of the world from first principles, as the ancient Greeks thought. Instead, one has to measure the space we live in, and find out its geometry by experiment. ..... although a way to describe curved spaces, was developed by the German, George Friedrich Riemann, in 1854, it remained just a piece of mathematics for sixty years. It could describe curved spaces that existed in the abstract, but there seemed no reason why the physical space we lived in, should be curved. ...... not only of curved space, but of curved or warped time as well. ...... the time and position at which one thought an event occurred, depended on how one was moving. This meant that time and space, were inextricably bound up with each other. The times that different observers would assign to events would agree if the observers were not moving relative to each other. But they would disagree more, the faster their relative speed. So one can ask, how fast does one need to go, in order that the time for one observer, should go backwards relative to the time of another observer. ........ If one couldn't go faster than light, the round trip to the nearest star, would take at least eight years, and to the center of the galaxy, at least eighty thousand years. If the space ship went very near the speed of light, it might seem to the people on board, that the trip to the galactic center had taken only a few years. But that wouldn't be much consolation, if everyone you had known was dead and forgotten thousands of years ago, when you got back. That wouldn't be much good for space Westerns. .......... We have experimental evidence, that space and time are warped. ..... can space and time be warped enough, to meet the demands from science fiction, for things like hyper space drives, wormholes, or time travel. ....... A particularly interesting one contains two cosmic strings, moving past each other at a speed very near to, but slightly less than, the speed of light. Cosmic strings are a remarkable idea of theoretical physics, which science fiction writers don't really seem to have caught on to. As their name suggests, they are like string, in that they have length, but a tiny cross section. Actually, they are more like rubber bands, because they are under enormous tension, something like a hundred billion billion billion tons. A cosmic string attached to the Sun would accelerate it naught to sixty, in a thirtieth of a second. ........ Cosmic strings may sound far-fetched, and pure science fiction, but there are good scientific reasons to believed they could have formed in the very early universe, shortly after the Big Bang. Because they are under such great tension, one might have expected them to accelerate to almost the speed of light. ...... Since General Relativity can permit time travel, does it allow it in our universe? And if not, why not. ......... Such wormholes have been seriously suggested, as being within the capabilities of a future civilization. But if you can travel from one side of the galaxy, to the other, in a week or two, you could go back through another wormhole, and arrive back before you set out. You could even manage to travel back in time with a single wormhole, if its two ends were moving relative to each other. ...... One can show that to create a wormhole, one needs to warp space-time in the opposite way, to that in which normal matter warps it. Ordinary matter curves space-time back on itself, like the surface of the Earth. ......... What one would need, would be matter with negative mass, and negative energy density, to make space-time warp in the way required. ...... Quantum Theory is more relaxed, and allows you to have an overdraft on one or two accounts. If only the banks were as accommodating. In other words, Quantum Theory allows the energy density to be negative in some places, provided it is positive in others. ........ The reason Quantum Theory can allow the energy density to be negative, is that it is based on the Uncertainty Principle. ..... The more accurately the position of a particle is defined, the greater is the uncertainty in its speed, and vice versa. The uncertainty principle also applies to fields, like the electro-magnetic field, or the gravitational field. It implies that these fields can't be exactly zeroed, even in what we think of as empty space. ...... the fields would have to have a certain minimum amount of fluctuations. One can interpret these so called vacuum fluctuations, as pairs of particles and anti particles, that suddenly appear together, move apart, and then come back together again, and annihilate each other. .......... virtual particles actually exist, and produce real effects. ..... experimental evidence from the bending of light, that space-time is curved, and confirmation from the Casimir effect, that we can warp it in the negative direction. So it might seem possible, that as we advance in science and technology, we might be able to construct a wormhole, or warp space and time in some other way, so as to be able to travel into our past. ........ A possible way to reconcile time travel, with the fact that we don't seem to have had any visitors from the future, would be to say that it can occur only in the future. ........ But because we can warp space-time only in the future, we wouldn't be able to travel back to the present time, or earlier. ...... according to Quantum Theory, the universe doesn't have just a unique single history. ........ the laws of physics conspire to prevent time travel, on a macroscopic scale. ...... According to string theory, which is our best hope of uniting General Relativity and Quantum Theory, into a Theory of Everything, space-time ought to have ten dimensions, not just the four that we experience. The idea is that six of these ten dimensions are curled up into a space so small, that we don't notice them. On the other hand, the remaining four directions are fairly flat, and are what we call space-time. If this picture is correct, it might be possible to arrange that the four flat directions got mixed up with the six highly curved or warped directions. What this would give rise to, we don't yet know. But it opens exciting possibilities.

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The SimpleGeo Promise

Image via CrunchBaseBefore Einstein the world was 3D. There were the three dimensions of space: length, breadth, height, the usual suspects. You could argue Euclid's world was 2D. Well, old man Einstein came along, and added the time dimension to the equation. And that had huge implications, humongous huge.

I think that whole metaphor is a great way to try to understand contemporary web tech. I just read the name SimpleGeo in a tweet and I saw its promise. I had heard of it before, I think I might even have read a TechCrunch article on it months back.

Jacob Barnett: Boy Genius?

The Daily Mail: Autistic boy,12, with higher IQ than Einstein develops his own theory of relativity: A 12-year-old child prodigy has astounded university professors after grappling with some of the most advanced concepts in mathematics. Jacob Barnett has an IQ of 170 - higher than Albert Einstein - and is now so far advanced in his Indiana university studies that professors are lining him up for a PHD research role. The boy wonder, who taught himself calculus, algebra, geometry and trigonometry in a week, is now tutoring fellow college classmates after hours. And now Jake has embarked on his most ambitious project yet - his own 'expanded version of Einstein's theory of relativity'. His mother, not sure if her child was talking nonsense or genius, sent a video of his theory to the renowned Institute for Advanced Study near Princeton University. According to the Indiana Star, Institute astrophysics professor Scott Tremaine -himself a world renowned expert - confirmed the authenticity of Jake's theory. ...... 'The theory that he's working on involves several of the toughest problems in astrophysics and theoretical physics. ..... 
Image via Wikipedia'Anyone who solves these will be in line for a Nobel Prize.' ...... 'Whenever I try talking about math with anyone in my family they just stare blankly.' ... Jake was diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome, a mild form of autism, from an early age. ..... he didn't talk until the age of two ...... He would fill up note pads of paper with drawings of complex geometrical shapes and calculations, before picking up felt tip pens and writing equations on windows. ..... By the age of three he was solving 5,000-piece puzzles and he even studied a state road map, reciting every highway and license plate prefix from memory. ..... By the age of eight he had left high school and was attending Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis advanced astrophysics classes. .... Jake has trouble sleeping at night as he constantly sees numbers in his head..... Jake has turned the sleepless nights to his advantage - debunking the big bang theory. ..... The next step, according to professor Ross, is for Jake to leave class altogether and take up a paid research role.

Am I Smart?

When you start talking in terms of a tech startup with IPO ambitions, I think it is fair for people to ask if you are smart. I am smart. I am plenty smart. I am a ton smart. But I don't walk into a room thinking I am the smartest person in the room. I don't think I ever have. Because when I enter a room, I am not looking at a mirror, I am looking at other people. I am eager to listen to what others have to say. And when people are being themselves they are interesting as a rule. I l-o-v-e making small talk with street vendors, for example. The street is not a room.

Larry Ellison

Image via Wikipedia

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Of all the dead people, Einstein is my favorite. Larry Ellison is very, very smart, but he is no genius. But of all the people alive today, my number one hero just so happens to be Larry Ellison. He is very, very smart, but I am sure I can dig up smarter people on the planet. Stephen Hawking is alive and he is borderline genius. (Stephen Hawking Has Taken Sick) It is Larry's life story. I find it vastly inspiring. It is not his smarts, but his out of the box thinking, his guts, his aggressiveness that gets me. I like the guy tremendously. I am fond of him. He gave the world his middle finger the first three decades of his life and then went ahead and created a multi-billion dollar company. That kind of gets me.

Google's Newest Venture: Google Ventures

Q: What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison?
A: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.

On another note, Brooke Ellison is my favorite New York politician. Larry does not know me, or of me, but I am honored to have an active Facebook friendship with Brooke. I have met her in person. (Hands Off Brooke Ellison) She has the most interesting Facebook wall of anyone I know. She says the darndest things.

• Jesus was born a Jew. Buddha was born a Madhesi. I am a Madhesi. Buddha was born on a full moon day. I was born on a full moon day.
• There are about 13 million Jewish people on the planet. There are about 13 million Madhesis on the planet.
• The Jews carved out their own land: Israel. We Madhesis are working to get our own state in a federal Nepal.
• There is anti-Semitism. There is strong anti-Madhesi prejudice in Nepal. http://demrepubnepal.blogspot.com
• NYC is the first hometown I ever had, and I was past 30 when I got here. There just so happen to be more Jews in NYC than in Tel Aviv.

Larry just bought Sun. And the world knows he is best friends with Steve Jobs. The question is could Larry come up with data centers that are the size of servers? Since now he is not just in the software business, but also in the hardware business like his friend Jobs. I think this bad boy of Silicon Valley could pull it off.

Larry Ellison - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lawrence J. Ellison | Executive Biography He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.
Transcript of an Interview with Larry Ellison by Reuters on the ...
Larry Ellison relives reveals network computer netbook dream‎ Oracle could get into the stripped down client PC business. ....... now Oracle is swallowing Sun, he could well imagine the market welcoming Java-powered netbooks.
Larry Ellison Gates and Microsoft compete with Oracle by offering consumers lower-priced products. Ellison and Oracle compete with Microsoft by hiring corporate spies operating through front companies, trying to pay off late night cleaning crews. ......... After conspiring with the Clinton gang to go after Microsoft - now Clinton is hitting him up to help pay for his library. ....... The guy from Oracle (NasdaqNM:ORCL) pushing national ID cards ... "in the electronic age, little privacy is left anyway" ......... in 1999, Oracle hired Investigative Group International ....... IGI....“promptly went trash-hunting” – literally prowling through dumpsters containing the garbage of trade associations and other groups friendly to Microsoft. Ellison’s response to this sleaze: “I feel very good about what we did,” he told the press. “All we did was to try to take information that was hidden and bring it into the light. I don’t think that’s arrogance. That’s public service.” .... "Hi there, can I buy you a car?" ........ a 33-year-old former employee accused of forging an email message. The woman [Adelyn Lee], who was fired shortly after an affair with Ellison, obtained a $100,000 settlement from him. ............ Ellison had previously been invited to join the year-old start-up's board of directors by the company's founder, Marc Benioff, a former Oracle employee. Then last month, Ellison, who is also an investor, was asked to resign because of a conflict of interest. The conflict? Oracle is launching a direct competitor called OracleSalesOnline.com. ............. Friends and foes alike are verbally abused by Ellison. He ridiculed America Online last year ............ Nathan Myhrvold, chief technologist at archrival Microsoft Corp., has been labeled an "idiot" by Ellison. ....... Ellison trounced the company last year by calling its products "very, very thin" and then adding: "You think everybody will start their day with a Netscape logo? No way. It's not going to happen." .......... -- one must wonder if we would actually choose to trade a Bill Gates dictatorship for Larry Ellison's form of technological totalitarianism. ............ Oracle has funded or supported numerous groups that have attacked Microsoft in recent years, such as ProComp, the Progress & Freedom Foundation, the Software & Information Industry Association, and the Computer & Communications Industry Association.......... crass behavior and pompous posturing. The highlight was his phony threat to lead a takeover of Apple. Retire to your mini-Japanese-village estate in Woodside, Larry. Let your teenage son fly around in the jet fighter you gave him for his birthday. Spend your billions. But please shut up ............ Larry Ellison, CEO of Redwood Shores-based Oracle Corp., is constructing a 23-acre Japanese-style imperial villa that will feature 500 mature cherry, maple, ginkgo, and other trees; 5,000 tons of Yuba River boulders; about 81,000 cubic yards of prime dirt; 10 buildings, including a 7,800-square-foot main residence; ponds, hills, islands, and a 2.7-acre main pond with a 3,200-foot shoreline that's fed by two waterfalls cascading from an upper level pond. Reportedly, the chateau has more than doubled in price to about $100 million
Larry Ellison Biography -- Academy of Achievement Ellison was born in the Bronx, New York. At nine months, he contracted pneumonia ....... raised in a two-bedroom apartment on the city's South Side ....... As a boy, Larry Ellison showed an independent, rebellious streak and often clashed with his adoptive father. From an early age, he showed a strong aptitude for math and science, and was named science student of the year at the University of Illinois. ......... enrolled at the University of Chicago the following fall, but dropped out again after the first semester. His adoptive father was now convinced that Larry would never make anything of himself, but the seemingly aimless young man had already learned the rudiments of computer programming ......... Berkeley, California, arriving with just enough money for fast food and a few tanks of gas. For the next eight years, Ellison bounced from job to job, working as a technician for Fireman's Fund and Wells Fargo bank. As a programmer at Ampex, he participated in building the first IBM-compatible mainframe system. ........ Codd's employers saw no commercial potential in the concept of a Structured Query Language (SQL), but Larry Ellison did. ........ Ellison and his partners won a two-year contract to build a relational database management system (RDBMS) for the CIA. The project's code name: Oracle. They finished the project a year ahead of schedule and used the extra time to develop their system for commercial applications. ........... In 1980, Ellison's company had only eight employees, and revenues were less than $1 million ......... The million dollar company was becoming a billion dollar company. Ellison renamed the company Oracle Corporation, for its best-selling product. ........... Oracle went public in 1986, raising $31.5 million ......... zealous young staff habitually overstated revenues, and in 1990 the company posted its first losses. Oracle's market capitalization fell by 80 percent and the company appeared to be on the verge of bankruptcy ........ Oracle 7, released in 1992, swept the field and made Oracle the industry leader in database management software. In only two years the company's stock had regained much of its previous value. ......... In 1998, Ellison and Sayonara won the Sydney to Hobart race, overcoming near-hurricane winds that sank five other boats, drowning six participants. ......... His own yacht, Rising Sun, over 450 feet long, is one of the largest privately owned vessels in the world. ........ the 1990s. America's banks, airlines, automobile companies and retail giants all came to depend on Oracle's database programs. ....... Oracle became a pioneer in providing business applications over the Internet. Oracle benefited hugely from the growth of electronic commerce; its net profits increased by 76 percent in a single quarter of the year 2000. ........ 2004, Ellison set out to increase Oracle's market share through a series of strategic acquisitions. Oracle spent more than $25 billion in only three years to buy a flock of companies and large and small, makers of software for managing data, identity, retail inventory and logistics. ....... in the depths of a global recession, Ellison once again acted boldly, acquiring computer hardware and software manufacturer Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion. Oracle is now the world's largest business software company, supplying all 100 of of the Fortune Global 100. ...... Since its founding, he has been Oracle's only Chief Executive Officer.
Pillar Data - Larry Ellison's other storage company • The Register Pillar Data is backed by Larry Ellison's personal investment vehicle, Tako Ventures, possibly to the tune of half a billion dollars. ....... Come the end of the recession, he can make a decent return on his investment by getting the company to IPO. Or, he could broker a deal one day to fold Pillar into Oracle.
Can Oracle survive Larry Ellison? - CNET News His senior management team is woefully depleted, with the loss over the past several years of Ray Lane, Gary Bloom, Robert Shaw, Randy Baker, Polly Sumner and many more. Not only is there no one at the top to challenge the often-mercurial Ellison, there is no clear successor to take over in an emergency. ...... a nearing-60 CEO who indulges in high-risk behavior and whose interest in his company is fitful. Two years ago, he told the Oracle AppsWorld conference that if he had to do it over again, he'd probably go into genetic engineering rather than computing. After three generations of computing (mainframes, client-server and Internet), "there will be no new architecture for computing for the next 1,000 years," he proclaimed. "The computing industry is about to become boring." ....... most of Oracle's problems are internal, related to its loss of management at the top, its alienation of everyone from customers to partners, its conflict-ridden culture that sucks energy into the black hole of corporate politics and, last but not least, the flawed personality of the Oracle himself, Larry Ellison. ........ he owns one-fourth of its stock and has a relatively weak board of directors ........ his propensity for fast jets, fast cars and sleek yachts ..... One wonders if he can even conceive of Oracle's existence without him. ...... "It's unclear if Oracle is a sustainable enterprise without Larry, because his personality is so firmly entrenched." ....... an aggressive, expansionist management style works, as long as you're winning. ........ With or without Ellison, his company's future seems so murky that even the ancient Delphic oracle could not predict it.
The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: *God Doesn't Think ... - Google Books Result Larry Ellison started the high-flying tech company Oracle with $1,200 in 1977

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Hunger, Vision, Money

"If you kick it around enough, it starts to look like a ball."
- Skip Shuda

"The greatest danger for most of us is not that we aim too high and we miss it, but we aim too low and reach it."
- Michelangelo

"Imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."
—Albert Einstein

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Why would someone, anyone come with me now? I am not a certified engineer. I am not rich. I feel like I have been both a high school and a college dropout. Why come along? Why come with me? Why team up with me? Why invest in my round one? Why believe?

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
- Mark Twain

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"The greatest reward in becoming a millionaire is not the amount of money that you earn. It is the kind of person that you have to become to become a millionaire in the first place."
- Jim Rohn

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"An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he'll quickly learn how to chew it.
- Roy Ash, co-founder of Litton Industries

Hunger

You have to feel the hunger. Everyone I know is online. If that is your line, you might not have the hunger. You have to have a passion for search to go work for Google. To connect every human mind to the web, and then some. That is the vision statement for my startup. If you don't feel for the five billion plus that are not online, you are not coming along. That's the bargain. You have to liberate a people if you are serious. Once a people can vote, they are in a position to help themselves. Internet access is the voting right for this 21st century. Today Mahatma Gandhi would have poured his energy into internet access for the billions. MLK would have . It is broadband that will bridge the gap between the west and the rest.

I grew up in the poorest country outside of Africa. I have the hunger. Do you? You don't have to have grown up in a poor country to have the hunger. You could simply care.

People who can't pay for food, how will they pay for broadband? They can pay because every human being has something called mindspace. Every human being is capable of consuming ads. I can't think of one village on the planet where Coke does not want to put up a billboard. They want to keep reinforcing the brand name. (Brands Will Still Matter) Broadband catalyzes work on all the other noble goals like fighting poverty, liberating people, conquering hunger and disease. Electricity is fundamental to economic activity. Broadband is like that, only much, much bigger.

"Business opportunities are like buses, there's always another one coming."
- Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Enterprises

Vision

"I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others... I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent."
- Thomas Edison

Are you someone who gets excited by new ideas? If new ideas threaten you, this is not for you. Do blinding visions blind you, or do they awaken you, stretch you? Are you too comfortable in your comfort zone? Are you risk averse as a rule? Or can you stretch? Because this startup has a panoramic vision. The idea is not to set up a corner coffee shop. The vision has global ambitions. This is not for the faint hearted.

"We were young, but we had good advice and good ideas and lots of enthusiasm."
- Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft Corporation

Money

"The cover-your-butt mentality of the workplace will get you only so far. The follow-your-gut mentality of the entrepreneur has the potential to take you anywhere you want to go or run you right out of business--but it's a whole lot more fun, don't you think?"
- Bill Rancic

If you have 100,000 dollars to invest, you should put 10K into this, or something like this. Most people never get an opportunity to come into the round one of a company that is headed for Nasdaq. If you have 10K to invest, you would be lucky to put 2K into something like this. Because the growth is astronomical. This is the oil beneath the ground in your backyard you did not know about. This is your winning lottery ticket. The risks are huge. That is why the rewards are humongous. To invest, to team up. Oh, the lure.

If a company's valuation goes from five million to 50 billion in 20 years, a $2,000 investment in round one has become 20,000,000. What could you on your own do to take your 2,000 to 20,000,000 in about 20 years? Many companies have achieved this kind of a growth trajectory before. This is no science fiction. This is history.

The rewards are huge for those who invest early, and team up early. I have not made a final decision on the formula for ownership stakes yet, but broadly speaking, earlier you join the team and higher up you are on the team chart, more your share. Anyone who leaves or is asked to leave before the company goes public goes to zero ownership. I want to come up with a new formula that is fair also to people who might team up five years after the company has gone public.

"My son is now an 'entrepreneur'. That's what you're called when you don't have a job."
- Ted Turner, broadcasting entrepreneur

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Image via Wikipedia

"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."
- Robert F. Kennedy

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"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower