Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American software engineer, a businessman, and the Executive Chairman of Alphabet, Inc.
In 2016, Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 100th-richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of US$11.6 billion.
As an intern at Bell Labs, Schmidt did a complete re-write of Lex, a software program to generate lexical analysers for the UNIX computer operating system. From 1997 to 2001, he was Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Novell.
From 2001 to 2011, Schmidt served as the CEO of Google. He has served on various other boards in academia and industry, including the Boards of Trustees for Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, and Princeton University, New Jersey.
Early life
Eric Emerson Schmidt was born in Falls Church, Virginia, and grew up in Falls Church and Blacksburg, Virginia. He was one of three sons of Eleanor, who had a master’s degree in psychology, and Wilson Emerson Schmidt, a professor of international economics at Virginia Tech and Johns Hopkins University, who worked at the U.S. Treasury Department during the Nixon Administration.
Schmidt graduated from Yorktown High School in the Yorktown neighborhood of Arlington County, Virginia, in 1972, after earning eight varsity letter awards in long-distance running. He then attended Princeton University, where he started as an architecture major but then switched and earned a B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1976. From 1976 to 1980, Schmidt stayed at the International House Berkeley, where he met his future wife, Wendy Boyle. In 1979, at the University of California, Berkeley, Schmidt then earned an M.S. degree for designing and implementing a network (Berknet) linking the campus computer center with the CS and EECS departments. There, he also earned a Ph.D. degree in 1982 in EECS, with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems.
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