People from Polk County

Clair Cameron Patterson (June 2, 1922 – December 5, 1995) was an American geochemist. Born in Mitchellville, Iowa, Patterson graduated from Grinnell College. He later received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and spent his entire professional career at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
In collaboration with George Tilton, Patterson developed the uranium–lead dating method into lead–lead dating. By using lead isotopic data from the Canyon Diablo meteorite, he calculated an age for the Earth of 4.55 billion years, which was a figure far more accurate than those that existed at the time, and one that has remained largely unchallenged since 1956.
Patterson first encountered lead contamination in the late 1940s as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. His work on this subject led to a total re-evaluation of the growth in industrial lead concentrations in the atmosphere and the human body, and his subsequent activism was seminal in the banning of tetraethyllead in gasoline and lead solder in food cans.

Jack Justin Stiffler (1934–2019) was an American electrical engineer, computer scientist and entrepreneur, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers who made key contributions in the areas of communications (especially coding theory) and fault-tolerant computing.

Clarence Reuben Autery (1933–2010) was a major general in the United States Air Force. In 1979, he appeared in the docudrama First Strike, scenes of which were later edited into the television film The Day After. In both films, Autery is portrayed as a SAC commander who is airborne on a command plane during a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. He was also interviewed about his role at SAC in Part One of the 1981 CBS News documentary series "The Defense Of The United States," which also used some of the "First Strike" footage.