Walter E. Donovan is a retired engineer who was born in Camden, New Jersey in 1950 and, as a teenager, did lots of chemical experiments, blew up lots of stuff, built three Tesla coils, a 40-KV 200-joule cockroach and wood vaporizer, and managed to keep all his appendages. In 1966, while in high school, Walter won a $1000.00 prize in a state-wide chemistry competition.
Wayne received a B.A. in math in 1970 from LaSalle College, a M.S. in computer science in 1973 from the University of Illinois and worked at the university for several years on a project with the United States Department of Agriculture using satellite imagery to forecast crop production.
Walt married in 1980 and moved with his wife to California where he worked for the United States Geological Survey, at the NASA Ames Research Center. He also spent several years working for Sun Microsystems and later spent 20 years working at Nvidia as a systems architect.
Walt found his interest in mineral collecting in 2018 after a visit to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. He later met Wayne Tompson at the 2020 Tucson show where Walt was showing off his family collection. He and Wayne talked about writing a book someday, and Ikons is the result of their collaboration with Dr. Robert Lavinsky, Dr. Wendell E. Wilson, and Sandor P. Fuss.