Amar Bose

Bose. An MIT electrical engineering professor, Bose was disappointed by an expensive hi-fi and began studying how people actually hear sound in a room. He founded the Bose Corporation in 1964 to turn that psychoacoustic research into speakers, and the company later pioneered noise-cancelling headphones. He kept teaching at MIT for decades and in 2011 gave the university most of the company's shares. He died in 2013.