File:Eric_Schmidt_at_the_37th_G8_Summit_in_Deauville_037_(cropped).jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons
Eric Schmidt
Sign in to saveAlso known as Eric Emerson Schmidt, Eric E. Schmidt
software engineer, businessman, former Google CEO
OverviewAI-generated
Eric Emerson Schmidt is an American computer scientist, engineer, and art collector born on April 27, 1955, in Washington, D.C. He holds a doctorate and has been educated at Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley. Schmidt has served as a chief executive officer and has been employed by Alphabet Inc., Apple Inc., and Stanford University. His professional fields include computer engineering and software engineering.
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. Schmidt has received the IEEE Founders Medal and the Ellis Island Medal of Honor. He is married to Wendy Schmidt and has resided in Blacksburg, Atherton, and Washington, D.C.
Synthesized by Vinony from 41 facts across 9 sources: Wikidata, Crossref, Open Library, MusicBrainz, Last.fm, TMDb, Wikiquote, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.
Person · Open Library
- Works
- 27
Top works
- How Google Works
- Five Little Carolers
- O Christmas Tree
- Genesis
- Arduino Programming for Beginners
via Open Library + Wikidata
Film & TV
Acting · Falls Church, Virginia, USA
Eric Schmidt is an American businessman, best known as a former CEO of Google.
Known for
- The Thinking Game2025
- Silicon Valley — Self2014
via TMDB
Music · MusicBrainz
- Type
- Person
- Gender
- Male
- Origin
- Austria
- Active from
- 1955
via MusicBrainz · CC0
Listeners · Last.fm
- Listeners
- 84
- Total plays
- 269
<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Eric+Schmidt">Read more on Last.fm</a>
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- Gene set enrichment analysis: A knowledge-based approach for interpreting genome-wide expression profiles
· 2005 · cited 48,861x
- UCSF Chimera—A visualization system for exploratory research and analysis
· 2004 · cited 44,346x
- SciPy 1.0: fundamental algorithms for scientific computing in Python
· 2020 · cited 36,548x
- The Genome Analysis Toolkit: A MapReduce framework for analyzing next-generation DNA sequencing data
· 2010 · cited 26,092x
- IQ-TREE: A Fast and Effective Stochastic Algorithm for Estimating Maximum-Likelihood Phylogenies
· 2014 · cited 24,523x
via Crossref · CC0
Quotes
- “When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that’s a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant. You should look for information. We should get it exactly right and we should give it to you in your language and we should never be wrong. That’s our challenge.”
- “Technology will move faster than governments, so don't legislate before you understand the consequences...”
- “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
- “I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
- “Ultimately, in the Internet, openness has always won. I cannot imagine that the current competitive environment would reverse that.”
- “I fundamentally believe that disinformation becomes so easy to generate, because complexity overwhelms knowledge, that it's in people's interests, if you will, over the next decade, to build disinformation-generating systems. This is true for corporations, for marketing, for governments, and so forth." (Eric Schmidt in dialogue with Julian Assange, June 2011 c.f When Google Met Wikileaks, p. 174)”
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
Key facts
- Born
- Eric Emerson Schmidt , ( 1955-04-27 ) April 27, 1955 (age 71) , Falls Church, Virginia , U.S.
- Citizenship
- United States Cyprus
- Education
- Princeton University ( BSE ) University of California, Berkeley ( MS , PhD )
- Occupation
- Businessman
- Years active
- 1985–present
- Title
- Co-founder, Schmidt Futures Founder and chairman, Special Competitive Studies Project CEO, Relativity Space Limited partner, Washington Commanders ( NFL )
- Spouse
- Wendy Boyle ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1980 )
- Children
- Sophie Schmidt Alison Schmidt
- Fields
- Computer engineering
- Thesis
- Controlling Large Software Development in a Distributed Environment (1982)
- Doctoral advisor
- Bob Fabry , Richard Fateman
- Website
- ericschmidt .com
via Wikipedia infobox
~34 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and former computer engineer who was the chief executive officer of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the company's executive chairman from 2011 to 2015. He also was the executive chairman of parent company Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, and technical advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020. Since 2025, he has been the CEO of Relativity Space, an aerospace manufacturing company. As of 2026, he is one of the wealthiest people in the world according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index with an estimated net worth of US$64.3 billion.
As an intern at Bell Labs, Schmidt in 1975 was co-author of Lex, a software program to generate lexical analysers for the Unix computer operating system. In 1983, he joined Sun Microsystems and worked in various roles. From 1997 to 2001, he was chief executive officer (CEO) of Novell. Schmidt has been on various other boards in academia and industry, including the boards of trustees for Carnegie Mellon University, Apple, Princeton University, and the Mayo Clinic. He also owns a minority stake in the National Football League (NFL) team Washington Commanders.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Eric Schmidt” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.