Ikigai Daily
Menu
DrivePerseverance biography

During Malawi's 2001–02 famine, 14-year-old William Kamkwamba had to drop out of school. Using diagrams from a library book called 'Using Energy', he built a windmill from a bicycle frame, blue-gum poles and scrapyard parts, and lit his family's house.

Malawi, 2002

TechnologyScienceBiography

The story behind the card

He left school because his family could no longer pay the fees. His first machine powered a few light bulbs and a radio in the family's house, and neighbours queued to charge their mobile phones. He later built a solar-powered pump that brought his village its first supply of drinking water. His story spread after a talk at TEDGlobal 2007 in Arusha, Tanzania. With the journalist Bryan Mealer he wrote the memoir The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2009), and in 2019 Chiwetel Ejiofor wrote and directed a film of the same name, also playing William's father. Kamkwamba went on to Dartmouth College in the United States, graduating in environmental studies in 2014.

Türkçe oku
Malavi'deki 2001–02 kıtlığında 14 yaşındaki William Kamkwamba okulu bırakmak zorunda kaldı. Kütüphanedeki Using Energy (Enerjiyi Kullanmak) kitabının çizimlerinden yararlanıp bisiklet iskeleti, okaliptüs direkleri ve hurda parçalarıyla bir yel değirmeni yaptı ve ailesinin evini aydınlattı.
Malavi, 2002

Okulu, ailesi kıtlıkta okul ücretini ödeyemediği için bırakmıştı. Yaptığı ilk makine evde birkaç ampulü ve bir radyoyu çalıştırdı; komşular cep telefonlarını şarj etmek için sıraya girdi. Kamkwamba sonradan güneş enerjisiyle çalışan bir pompa kurdu ve köyüne ilk içme suyunu getirdi. Hikâyesi, 2007'de Tanzanya'nın Arusha kentindeki TEDGlobal konferansında yaptığı konuşmayla duyuldu. Gazeteci Bryan Mealer'la birlikte The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (Rüzgârı Dizginleyen Çocuk) adlı anı kitabını yazdı (2009); 2019'da Chiwetel Ejiofor aynı adlı filmi yazıp yönetti ve filmde William'ın babasını da oynadı. Kamkwamba daha sonra ABD'deki Dartmouth College'da çevre bilimleri okudu ve 2014'te mezun oldu.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: William Kamkwamba
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderScience

Gladys West, a mathematician at a US Navy laboratory, programmed computers to build ever more accurate models of the Earth's true shape from satellite data. That work helped lay the groundwork for satellite navigation systems such as GPS.

West grew up on her family's farm in rural Virginia and won a scholarship to Virginia State College. In 1956 she was hired as a mathematician at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia, where she stayed for 42 years. The Earth is not a perfect sphere: it bulges at the equator, and its gravity varies from place to place. Scientists describe its true shape with the geoid, the surface the oceans would take under gravity alone, and positions and heights are measured against it. From the mid-1970s West programmed an IBM Stretch computer to calculate this shape ever more precisely, using data from satellites such as Seasat, whose radar altimetry project she managed, and Geosat. Her role became widely known only in 2018, when she was inducted into the US Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame.

Gladys WestRead card
DriveBiography

Christine Darden, a NASA engineer, wrote computer programs to predict sonic booms, the thunder-like bangs made by aircraft flying faster than sound. Her research showed that reshaping a plane's nose and wings could make them softer on the ground.

Darden, a mathematics graduate of Hampton Institute, joined NASA's Langley Research Center in 1967 as a 'human computer', doing calculations for engineers. She pressed her managers to move her into engineering, and in the 1970s they did. A sonic boom forms when the shock waves from an aircraft's nose, wings and tail merge into one sharp jolt that reaches the ground. Darden's programs modelled those waves and pointed to shapes that keep them from merging, so people below hear a softer thump. She earned a doctorate in engineering from George Washington University in 1983, led NASA's sonic boom team from 1989 and wrote more than 50 papers. NASA's X-59, which first flew on 28 October 2025, was built to test this idea. Her story is also told in Margot Lee Shetterly's book Hidden Figures.

Christine DardenRead card
DriveBiography

Evelyn Boyd Granville, one of the first Black American women to earn a PhD in mathematics, wrote computer programs at IBM that calculated orbits for Vanguard and Mercury, the early US satellite and crewed spaceflight projects. She later worked on the Apollo programme.

Granville grew up in Washington, D.C., studied mathematics and physics at Smith College and earned her doctorate at Yale in 1949. Among Black American women, only Euphemia Lofton Haynes, in 1943, had earned a mathematics PhD before her; Marjorie Lee Browne finished hers the same year. Top academic posts were closed to Black women, so she taught at Fisk University, then joined IBM in 1956. At its Vanguard Computing Center in Washington she turned the mathematics of orbits into computer programs, and she later worked on trajectory calculations for Apollo at North American Aviation. From 1967 she was a professor at California State University, Los Angeles, co-wrote a textbook on mathematics for teachers and ran maths enrichment programmes for young children. She died in 2023, aged 99.

Evelyn Boyd GranvilleRead card
WonderBiography

Radia Perlman, an American engineer, invented the spanning-tree algorithm, which stops data from circling endlessly in computer networks that have duplicate connections. It keeps the spare links switched off and brings one back into use when a cable fails.

When a network has more than one path between two points, a message can loop round and round, copying itself until the network jams. Perlman solved this in the mid-1980s while working at Digital Equipment Corporation. Her method lets the switches that connect a network agree among themselves, with no central controller, on one loop-free set of routes shaped like a branching tree; the extra links wait on standby. If a link breaks, the switches recalculate and a standby link takes over. The IEEE, the body behind many networking standards, adopted the method as 802.1D in 1990, and it and its faster successors still keep office and campus networks running. Perlman even described the algorithm in a short poem, “Algorhyme”.

Radia PerlmanRead card
WonderBiography

In 1988 Belgian-American mathematician Ingrid Daubechies published the wavelets now named after her: small wave-like patterns that split a signal into its broad outline and its fine detail. Wavelets like hers help compress images, clean up noisy data and store fingerprints.

Fourier analysis, the classic tool for signals, shows which frequencies a sound or picture contains but not where they occur. Wavelets can also show where a sudden change or sharp edge happens. Working at the Courant Institute in New York in 1986–87, Daubechies found wavelets that are exact, confined to a short stretch of the signal and quick to compute, which let wavelets move from theory into everyday digital processing. Related wavelets she co-designed are used in the JPEG 2000 image standard, and the FBI's fingerprint archive relies on wavelet compression. She has also used these methods to study paintings by Van Gogh and to support the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece. In 2011 she became the first woman to lead the International Mathematical Union, and in 2023 the first woman to win the Wolf Prize in Mathematics.

Ingrid DaubechiesRead card
Next card in the archiveAlice Coachman grew up in segregated Georgia, shut out of whites-only sports grounds, and trained barefoot on dirt roads, jumping over homemade bars of rope and sticks. At the 1948 London Olympics she won the high jump, the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal.Read next →