An Wang
The man who fixed core memory's read problem, sold the patent to IBM, and built an empire on word processors.
An Wang (1920–1990) came from Shanghai to Howard Aiken's computation lab at Harvard after the war. There, in 1949, he and Way-Dong Woo solved a basic problem with magnetic cores: reading a core destroyed what it held. Their "pulse transfer controlling device" automatically wrote the bit back after each read, making core memory genuinely usable. Wang sold the patent to IBM for half a million dollars after a drawn-out dispute.
With the money he founded Wang Laboratories in 1951, which first sold core memories and calculators and, through the 1970s and 80s, became one of the world's largest makers of word-processing systems. The company failed to make the jump to personal computers and went bankrupt in 1992, two years after its founder's death.