Donations: $1.1 billion

Education: MS, University of Karlsruhe

Marital Status: Married ,Children: 2

A trained physicist. He and four former IBM colleagues founded German software company SAP in 1972; with 2009 sales and software profits down, SAP is restructuring. Retired from SAP in 1998. Stepped down from its supervisory board in May 2007. Devotes his time to his Klaus Tschira Foundation, one of Germany's largest philanthropies.

The SAP cofounder donated 7 million of his shares in 1995 to found the Klaus Tschira Foundation, a nonprofit established to foster public understanding of mathematics, informatics and natural sciences (an amateur astronomer, Tschira has a small asteroid named after him). Retired from SAP in 1998, devotes his time to his foundation, promoting such projects as grants for single parents studying information science and economics and computer camp for vision-impaired youth. Klaus Tschira has an estimated net worth of $8.6 billion as of October 2015, according to Forbes.