“Gordon was a brilliant and visionary pioneer, but also a quiet, modest man with steely determination and grit,” says Professor Emeritus of Engineering Paul Gray. “The microchip technology and resulting global semiconductor industry that he and his colleagues created profoundly changed the world and improved the life of virtually every person on the planet.”
A founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, Moore was a central figure in the technological revolution that transformed computers from room-sized-punch-card-reading machines to the lightweight devices we have come to rely on. Much of what we refer to as “smart” has its origins in Moore’s curiosity about the natural world — a driving spirit of inquiry that ultimately led him to champion silicon as the base material for the now-ubiquitous microchip.
Before pursuing degrees in chemistry at Berkeley and Caltech, Moore spent a lot of time exploring the outdoors around the small California town of Pescadero, where his father was the deputy sheriff and his mother’s family ran a general store. His early exploration of the land around Pescadero developed into a passion for fly fishing, an activity he would later pursue with another aficionado, Robert Tjian, Howard Hughes Medical Institute president and Berkeley professor of biochemistry, biophysics, and structural biology.
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