Famous Thinkers

Introduction

Most professionals share different thoughts concerning the creative thinking process and the role it plays in individual productivity and business lifecycles. This paper will provide information about the contributions to society by two famous thinkers, Bill Gates and Professor Derek Parfit. In addition, this paper will examine each thinker's personal/social/political environments and how these factors contributed to their creativity, the problems or issues that their ideas sought to solve, and a description of the solutions, and how their ideas were implemented. Lastly, this paper will discuss the creative process of each thinker, a comparison of the two creative processes, a critique of their ideas, and what they could have done differently.

Contributions to Society

To fully understand the important impacts that Bill Gates and Derek Parfit have made to modern society and for years to come it is vital to understand the problems they wished to solve and how their environments helped shape their creativity. At first glance it may be hard to imagine or understand why Gates and Professor Parfit are discussed within the same paper. As later explained, the solutions and contributions they provided are different except for their creativeness and brilliant thinking ability to change the world.

Bill Gates

Bill Gates, Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft Corporation, founded Microsoft in 1975, according to Oxford Reference (2012). Bill Gates is well known for the development of Windows that was just a prototype in 1983, but is currently the dominant personal-computer operating system, according to the Economist (2003). Gates is known worldwide for his innovative and creative thinking, business tactics, and of course, his vast wealth. According to Oxford Reference (2012) he was found guilty of breaking United States anti-monopoly laws in 2000. In 2008, he left Microsoft to focus on philanthropy although he remained a non-executive chairman at Microsoft Corp.

Derek Parfit

Derek Parfit is an English philosopher who was born in China in 1942 and educated at Balliol College in Oxford. Parfit is well known for his interests in metaphysical questions that have moral and emotional significance, according to New York University (2012). In addition, Parfit concentrates on the relationships between personal identity, ethics, and rationality, according to Oxford Reference (2012). Professor Parfit is a world-renowned author and "currently a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences," according to New York University (2012).

Environmental Impacts

Each thinker's personal, social, and political environments helped shape their creativity and played an important role in determining the problems or issues they sought to solve. According to Forbes (2012), Bill Gates is the richest person in the United States and second in the world at a net worth of 61 billion. This does not include the nearly $28 billion he has given away so far. His newest focus is building a better toilet for those without water or sewage systems.

While attending college he began working with his partner Paul Allen to develop scheduling systems in school, traffic light patterns, and a myriad of other programs until he discovered the Altair microcomputer that let him to drop out of college and found Microsoft. These environments allowed Gates to create software that has changed the lives of the world and create enormous wealth. With the immense wealth he has created he and his wife created the William H. Gates foundation in 1994 after studying the philanthropic work of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. The Gates foundation dedicated its support to education, world health, and low-income communities and later changed its name to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with a modest $28 billion initial contribution, according to Biography (2012).

Professor Derek Parfit was born to two Medical Doctors who had spent time in China teaching preventive medicine. Parfits' parents moved back to Oxford when he was just a year old, according to Oxford Reference (2012). Following his graduation from Eton College and his program at University of Oxford, he changed his degree of study from history to philosophy. Parfit raised many eyebrows when he published Reasons and Persons, a four part work. In this book he created the self-interest theory or rationality. In addition, he created two ethical frameworks in this book, common sense morality and consequentialism, according to Oxford Reference (2012). "The self-interest theory holds that it is irrational to commit any acts of self-denial or to act on desires that