Nicholas Negroponte
O.K., so his big brother John is Director of National Intelligence and delivers daily briefings to the President. But Nicholas Negroponte, 62, is trying to reach a far more challenging audience: the world's poorest children. The co-founder of M.I.T.'s Media Lab and former Wired columnist took a leave from academia last year to build a computer--a laptop so cheap that developing countries could buy them by the millions to help their kids leapfrog into the 21st century.
It's an ambitious project, but the charismatic Negroponte has a persuasive pitch and a knack for fund raising. With the support of the U.N.,...