Biography
As director of the Center for Computer Research and Musical Acoustics at Stanford University (CCRMA), John Chowning has long been an articulate and enthusiastic spokesman for music produced by electronic means. While still a graduate student in composition at Stanford in 1964, he became interested in electronic music. Since the school had no analog synthesis equipment but did have a large computer, he jumped directly into digital synthesis. In the '70s, the results of his research in the field of digital FM synthesis were licensed to Yamaha, and the rest is history.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.