Architect Ieoh Ming Pei was born on April 27, 1917, in Guangdong Province, China.
He moved to the United States at the age of 17 and enrolled in the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He soon dropped out and transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While there, he was strongly influenced by Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. He graduated from MIT in 1940 and worked as a draftsman.
He received a Master of Architecture from Harvard University in 1946. He worked in the design office of Gropius and also served as an assistant professor at the university. He was then invited by real estate developer William Zeckendorf to work as an in-house architect for Webb & Knapp. In 1965, he founded his own architectural firm, I.M. Pei & Partners, in New York, and designed buildings such as the John Hancock Tower and the National Gallery of Art's East Building. He was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1983.

He retired as the firm's representative in 1989 and went on to design the Louvre Pyramid at the Louvre Museum, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Bank of China Hong Kong branch building, the MIHO MUSEUM, and more. He is also known as the "Magician of Geometry" for the style of his work.