Norman Foster
The characteristics that distinguish Foster's work are his constant compromise with the noblest values in architecture, his open approach to innovation, his thoroughness in all phases of a project, his use of state-of-the Art technology, the magnitude of his career and his compliancy with the principles of sustainable development. This candidacy was put forward by Alfonso Vegara, President of the Metropoli Foundation (Spain).
Norman Foster was born in 1935 in Manchester (United of Kingdom) to a working-class family. At the age of 21 he began his architecture studies, which he financed by taking different jobs. After graduating in 1961 at the Manchester University School of Architecture and City Planning, he moved to the United States where he was granted a scholarship to Yale University. There he learnt about the work of such personalities as Lloyd Wright and Kahn, who influenced him significantly. His interest in technology and in overcoming the distance between technology and the building industry came to being in 1966, when he carried out a project for a factory in Wiltshire. In 1967 he founded Foster Associated, a studio which focuses on town planning and objects related to building, with its head office in London and where some of his most outstanding work has been carried out. In 1999 its name changed to Foster and Partners. He currently leads a team of a thousand professionals, with branches in more than 20 countries.
Martin Cooper
Martin Cooper was born in Chicago (Illinois, U.S.A.) in 1928 and received his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering in 1950. A pioneer in the wireless communication industry, Cooper invented the first handheld mobile telephone and supervised the ten years that were necessary to commercialize the product. He worked for Motorola for 30 years, where he developed new products that were very profitable for the company. After leaving Motorola, he co-founded the company Cellular Business Systems, which soon dominated the mobile telephony market. In 1992 he was similarly successful with ArrayComm, of which he is executive director and where he developed a system of smart antennas, another great revolution in the world of wireless communication, with uses not only for mobile telephones but also for long-range wireless Internet.
Cooper has worked together with the United States government to allocate new radio frequency spectrums and has formulated the Law on Spectrum Efficiency, also known as Cooper's Law, which states that the maximum amount of information that is transmitted over a given amount of radio spectrum doubles every 30 months. In 2002 he received the George R. Stibitz Computer and Communications Pioneer Award from the American Computer Museum and the Leader Award-Wireless Systems Design.
Raymond Samuel Tomlinson
Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam (New York) in 1941. He attended the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in his hometown, where he participated in a program with IBM. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer in 1963 and then went on to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1967 he joined the technology company Bolt Beranek and Newman -now BBN Technologies- where he helped develop the TENEX operating system, which included the ARPANET and TELNET implementations. In 1971 he developed ARPANet's first application for e-mail by combining the SNDMSG and CPYNET programs so messages could be sent to users on other computers. He chose the @ sign to separate local from global e-mails in the mail address. Soon, the @ sign became the digital icon that it is today.
Tomlinson's first program brought about a complete revolution, breaking through the initial obstacles that stood in the way of the future development of e-mail, which quickly became one of the most commonly used applications on the net and which, due to its immediacy and low cost, has managed to fulfill communication demands in developed societies. In 2000 he received the George R. Stibitz Computer Pioneer Award from the American Computer Museum. In 2001 he received a Webby Award from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. In 2002 Discover Magazine awarded him its Innovation Award. In 2004, he received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Internet Award (U.S.A.) along with Dave Crocker.
This year a total of 26 candidatures from Austria, Brazil, Cuba, France, Italy, Peru, Portugal, United Kingdom, United States, Russia, and Spain ran for the award. This is the first of eight Prince of Asturias Awards, which are being bestowed this year for the twenty-ninth time. Each of the Prince of Asturias Awards, which date back to 1981, is endowed with 50,000 Euros, a commissioned sculpture donated by Joan Miró, a diploma and an insignia.
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