Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Elliot "Zuck" Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American entrepreneur who co-founded the social networking site Facebook with classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes while attending Harvard University. As of 2010, he is a 24% shareholder of Facebook.

Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York to Karen, a psychiatrist, and Edward, a dentist. Mark and three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle, were brought up in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Zuckerberg was raised Jewish, including having had a Bar Mitzvah when he turned 13, although he has since described himself as an atheist.

Zuckerberg started programming when he was in middle school. His father taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and then software developer David Newman was hired as his tutor in about 1995. Zuckerberg also took a graduate course in the subject at Mercy College near his home in the mid-1990s. He enjoyed developing computer programs, especially communication tools and games. He also designed and programmed a computer application system to help the workers in his father's office communicate; he built a version of the game Risk.

At Ardsley High School he had excelled in the classics before in his junior year transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy, where Zuckerberg won prizes in science (math, astronomy and physics) and Classical studies (on his college application, Zuckeberg listed as non-English languages he could read and write: French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek) and was captain of the fencing team. During Zuckerberg's high school years, under the company name Intelligent Media Group, he built a music player named the Synapse Media Player that used artificial intelligence to learn the user's listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine.^[11] Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he instead went to Harvard College in September 2002 where he studied computer science and psychology and joined Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity. In college, he was known for reciting lines from epic poems such as The Iliad.
At a fraternity party during his sophomore year, Zuckerberg met Priscilla Chan, who subsequently became his girlfriend. In September 2010, Chan, now a medical student, moved into Zuckerberg's rented Palo Alto house. As of September 2010, Zuckerberg was studying Mandarin with a tutor in preparation for the couple's slated visit to China and possibly to help in setting up operations in China, since Facebook, like Twitter, is blocked by that country's internet firewall.

Zuckerberg (right) with Robert Scoble in 2008.

In 2010, Stephen Levy, who authored the 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, wrote that Zuckerberg "clearly thinks of himself as a hacker." Zuckerberg said that "it's OK to break things" "to make them better." Facebook instituted "hackathons" held every six to eight weeks where participants would have one night to conceive of and complete a project. The company provided music, food, and beer at the hackathons, and many Facebook staff members, including Zuckerberg, regularly attended. "The idea is that you can build something really good in a night,” Zuckerberg told Levy. "And that’s part of the personality of Facebook now ... It’s definitely very core to my personality."
On Zuckerberg's Facebook page, he listed his personal interests as "openness, making things that help people connect and share what's important to them, revolutions, information flow, minimalism."
Vanity Fair magazine named Zuckerberg number 1 on its 2010 list of the Top 100 "most influential people of the Information Age". Zuckerberg ranked number 23 on the Vanity Fair 100 list in 2009. In 2010, Zuckerberg was chosen as number 16 in New Statesman's annual survey of the world's 50 most influential figures.
Zuckerberg sees blue best because of red–green colorblindness; blue is also Facebook's dominant color.