John C. Bogle ’51
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Bogle dramatically disrupted the worlds of finance and investing with his Vanguard Group, inventing the index fund and making it available to the broad American public.
Historical Figures
Historical Figures content overview
Cornel West *80
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West is a theologian and public intellectual who taught in Princeton’s African American studies department and ran for president as a third-party candidate in 2024.
Wendy Kopp ’89
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Kopp famously created the public service corps Teach for America from the ideas in her Princeton thesis.
Meg Whitman ’77
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Whitman is a businesswoman who has served at top levels of major companies including eBay and Hewlett Packard. She is currently the U.S. ambassador to Kenya.
Brooke Shields ’87
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A former child star known for provocative films including Blue Lagoon, Shields is an actress, model, author, podcast host, and entrepreneur.
Eric Schmidt ’76
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Schmidt was executive chairman of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, and received Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Award in 2017.
James Stewart ’32
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Stewart polished his acting chops at Princeton’s Triangle Club and later found a permanent place in American cinema, perhaps most famously by playing George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life.
George F. Kennan 1925
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Kennan was a scholar and diplomat who worked to contain Soviet communism during the Cold War and famously authored a 1946 foreign policy document known as the Long Telegram.
Bill Bradley ’65
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Bradley starred on the Tigers’ basketball team before playing for a decade with the New York Knicks. He served as a democratic U.S. senator from New Jersey from 1979-97.
Richard Feynman *42
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A scientist and mathematician, Feynman made many contributions to theoretical physics and received a Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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Oppenheimer was a physicist who directed the Institute for Advanced Study and led the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb and end World War II.
Elena Kagan ’81
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Justice Kagan was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2010 by President Barack Obama. She was dean of Harvard Law School and the first woman to serve as U.S. solicitor...
Sonia Sotomayor ’76
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Justice Sotomayor was nominated for the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama in 2009. Born in the Bronx, she studied history and won the Pyne Prize at Princeton.
F. Scott Fitzgerald 1917
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Famously, Fitzgerald set his Jazz Age novel This Side of Paradise at Princeton, and reportedly died while reading the Princeton Alumni Weekly.
Alan Turing *38
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Considered the father of computer science, Turing is known for helping to break the codes created by Germany’s Enigma machine during World War II.
Hobey Baker 1914
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Baker was a legendary hockey and football player who died in 1918 when the military airplane he was flying crashed. His friends and admirers raised the funds to build Hobey...
Toni Morrison
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Morrison taught creative writing at Princeton and in 1993 received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her lauded novels include The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved.
Alan Blinder ’67
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Blinder is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton who served on President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and then as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Lyman Spitzer *38
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Known as the “father of the Hubble Space Telescope,” Spitzer returned to Princeton in 1947 to serve as chair of the Department of Astrophysical Sciences.
Albert Einstein
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Likely the world’s most famous theoretical physicist, Einstein developed the theory of relativity and was a resident scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Michelle Obama ’85
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Obama is an author and attorney who served as first lady of the United States during her husband’s presidency from 2009-17.
Jeff Bezos ’86
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Bezos is an entrepreneur who founded the online mega-marketplace Amazon.com and owns The Washington Post newspaper and Blue Origin, an aerospace manufacturer, among other ventures.