Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon; Vint Cerf, "Father of the Internet" and now Chief Internet Evangelist at Google; and SETI astronomer Jill Tarter of "Contact" fame will honored at the Liberty Science Center Genius Gala 4.0 event on May 1. (Photos courtesy Liberty Science Center)
JERSEY CITY -- Liberty Science Center will bestow its Genius Awards on Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon; Vint Cerf, widely referred to as father of the Internet; and astronomer Jill Tarter of "Contact" fame at its Genius Gala 4.0, an extravagant celebration of science and creativity on Friday, May 1.
"Our three 2015 Genius Award winners are singularly brilliant men and women," said Paul Hoffman, president and CEO of Liberty Science Center. "These out-of-the-box geniuses deserve to be honored in an out-of-the-box way."
Previous Genius Awards honorees are Sir Richard Branson, Garry Kasparov, Jane Goodall, Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Dean Kamen, Sylvia Earle, Craig Venter, Cori Bargmann, and Erno Rubik.
All Gala proceeds benefit LSC's exhibitions and programs -- onsite, offsite, and online. The Genius Gala begins at 6 p.m. and ticket prices start at $1,250 per guest with options for table sponsorship up to $100,000. For more details, please visit lsc.org/gala.
Seven hundred movers and shakers from New York and New Jersey will walk the green carpet and pose for "dronies" -- photos taken from hovering quadcopters -- and mingle with R2-D2, challenge a fist-pumping Rubik's Cube-solving robot over cocktails, and watch a hair-raising 1-million-volt Tesla Coil lightning show before dinner.
David Blaine, the renowned endurance artist and LSC's magician-in-residence will return as the program's featured performer. John Urschel, of the NFL's Baltimore Ravens and an elite mathematician, will be one of the celebrity presenters at the Genius Awards ceremony.
Former Gov. Tom Kean, who presided over the groundbreaking of Liberty Science Center in 1989, will receive what organizers are calling an "out-of-this-world" 80th birthday salute.
New drawings for SciTech Scity, an unprecedented and ambitious initiative by LSC and Jersey City to turn 16 acres of underdeveloped city land into a campus for science and technology entrepreneurship and education, will debut publicly at the event.
Bezos, a graduate of Princeton, is also the founder of Blue Origin, a human spaceflight company; and owner of The Washington Post. He was named Time magazine's Person of the Year in 1999.
Cerf's numerous honors include the U.S. National Medal of Technology, the ACM Alan M. Turing Award -- popularly known as "the Nobel Prize of computer science" -- and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Tarter occupies the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. In 2004, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Jodie Foster played a woman based on Tarter in the 1997 film Contact, adapted from Carl Sagan's novel of the same name.