On April 9, 2014, Professor Stuart Parkin receives the Millennium Technology Prizean important recognition that in previous years had gone to other technology pioneers such as Tim Berners Lee (for the World Wide Web) and a Linus Torvalds (per Linux).
Professor Parkin was being awarded for something apparently less striking, but in reality fundamental: the discoveries that have allowed a thousandfold improvement of the ability of magnetic hard disks to hold data. Let’s say it differently: if today we can see streaming movies on Netflix, watch TikTok videos and listen to Spotify music it is also for the technologies discovered by Parkin. It is no coincidence that some say that “the era of big data began” with him, while the Guardian, giving the news, said that Parkin had paved the way for cloud computing. In short, a genius that few of us know.
Stuart Stephen Papworth Parkin è born in 1955 in Watford, England. His discoveries of him date back to 1989, when he was 34 and was ushering in a new scientific field, called spintronic. Among his many roles is in fact that of director of the IBM-Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center. But today he lives in Germany where he directs a laboratory of the Max Planck Institute.
After the announcement, a Guardian reporter joined him and he said he would use the million dollar prize to buy a house in Halle, Germany and invite his fiancée out to dinner at a German restaurant the couple really love.