[whatthefish]

From Wikipedia:

A number of Cornellians have been prominent innovators, starting with Thomas Midgley, Jr. ('11),[287] the inventor of Freon. Jeff Hawkins ('79)[288] invented the Palm Pilot and subsequently founded Palm, Inc. Graduate Jon Rubinstein ('78)[289] is credited with the development of the iPod. William Higinbotham developed Tennis for Two in 1958, one of the earliest computer games and the predecessor to Pong, and Robert Tappan Morris developed the first computer worm on the Internet. The most direct evidence of dark matter was provided by Vera Rubin ('51).[290] Jill Tarter ('66)[291] is the current director of the SETI Institute and Steve Squyres ('81)[292] is the principal investigator on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Eight Cornellians have served as NASA astronauts. Bill Nye ('77) is best known as "The Science Guy".[293]

Really, you should know the Robert Morris one off the top of your head at the very least.

[Alex3917]

Also, Cornell is named after a guy who made his money in the communication technologies business. Unlike Yale, Stanford, Duke, and most of the other elite schools in the U.S., which are named after drug dealers.

[kloncks]

Drug dealers!? Please elaborate.

[Duff]

Elihu Yale was a Governor of the British East India Company, which made the King rich by peddling drugs to the Chinese, among other thing.

Don't know about the rest.

[gcampbell]

I thought the preferred pejorative for Leland Stanford was "robber baron".

[Duff]

Or "Captain of Industry" in friendlier contexts.

[ctkrohn]

Duke's name comes from a tobacco businessman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Buchanan_Duke

[3am]

The CTO of RightScale, Thorsten Von Eicken, taught the undergrad computer architecture course (CS 314) for a couple of semesters.