- Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte (born December 1, 1943) is a Greek-American architect and computer scientist best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and also known as the founder of The One Laptop per Child association (OLPC).
- Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 - June 30, 1974) was an American engineer and science administrator, known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb, and the idea of the memex-seen as a pioneering concept for the World Wide Web. A leading figure in the development of the military-industrial complex and the military funding of science in the United States, …
- Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky, Ph.D (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, and a prolific author and lecturer. He is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of linguistics made in the 20th century.
- Charles Stark Draper
Charles Stark Draper, Sc.D. is often referred to as "the father of inertial navigation." Born in Windsor, Missouri, he attended the University of Missouri in 1917, Stanford University, California in 1919, and MIT in 1922. While at MIT, he earned an S.B. in electrochemical engineering in 1926, and an S.M. and Sc.D. in physics in 1928 and 1938 respectively. While at MIT, he founded the Instrumentation Laboratory in the 1930s, …
- David Baltimore
David Baltimore (b. March 7, 1938) is an American biologist and one of the recipients of the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He is currently the Robert A. Millikan Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he was the president from 1997 to 2006. He is also currently the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Baltimore was born in New York City.
- Gerald Jay Sussman
Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his S.B. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from MIT in 1968 and 1973, respectively. He has been involved in artificial intelligence research at MIT since 1964. His research has centered on understanding the problem-solving strategies used by scientists and engineers, …
- Morris Halle
Morris Halle, né Pinkowitz, is an American linguist. He was born in Liepaja, Latvia, in 1923, and moved with his family to Riga in 1929. They arrived in the United States in 1940. From 1941 to 1943, Halle studied engineering at the City College of New York. He entered the United States Army in 1943 and was discharged in 1946, at which point he went to the University of Chicago, where he got his master's degree in linguistics in 1948.
- Hal Abelson
Harold (Hal) Abelson is Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a Fellow of the IEEE. He holds an A.B. degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from MIT. He joined the MIT faculty in 1973. In 1992, Abelson was designated as one of MIT's six inaugural MacVicar Faculty Fellows, in recognition of his significant and sustained contributions to teaching and undergraduate education.
- Karl Taylor Compton
Karl Taylor Compton (September 14, 1887 - June 22, 1954) was a prominent American physicist and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1930 to 1948.
- Ellen Swallow Richards
Ellen Henrietta (Swallow) Richards (December 3, 1842 - March 30, 1911) was the foremost female industrial and environmental chemist in the United States in the 1800s, pioneering the field of home economics. Richards was the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its first female instructor, the first woman in America accepted to any school of science and technology, and the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry.
- Eric Lander
Eric Steven Lander (b. February 3, 1957) is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a member of the Whitehead Institute, and director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who has devoted his career toward realizing the promise of the human genome for medicine. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1974 and then attended Princeton University.
- John Harbison
John Harris Harbison (born December 20, 1938 in Orange, New Jersey) is a composer, best known for his operas and large choral works. Harbison won the prestigious BMI Foundation's Student Composer Awards for composition at the age of sixteen in 1954. He studied music at Harvard University, where he sang with the Harvard Glee Club, and later at Princeton. He is an Institute Professor of music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- L. Rafael Reif
L. Rafael Reif is a professor of Electrical Engineering and the current Provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reif previous served as the head of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science between 2004 and 2005 and the director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories. Reif received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the Universidad de Carabobo, Valencia, …
- Harold Eugene Edgerton
Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton, Sc.D. was a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is largely credited with transforming the stroboscope from an obscure laboratory instrument into a common device seen in nearly every camera. He grew up in Aurora, Nebraska and attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. After graduating, he married Esther Garret in 1928. During their marriage they had three children: William, Robert, and Mary Lou.
- James Sherley
James Sherley, Ph.D, M.D, is a biological engineer and an associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sherley's education includes an MD and a PhD as well as being a 1993 Pew Scholar. He is open about his opposition to embryonic stem cell research, and instead, Sherley's research focuses on the molecular and biochemical mechanisms of adult stem cells.
- Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky is here critical of many current researchers in artificial intelligence researchers who he feels have gotten bogged down in theories of machine learning. He sees this as a crisis point in a time of an aging population that he feels will need help in performing many tasks. "We have a computer program that can beat a world chess champion, but we don’t have one that can reach for an umbrella on a rainy day, or put a pillow in a pillow case."
- Jerome Wiesner
Jerome Wiesner (May 30, 1915 – October 21, 1994) was an educator, a science advisor to U.S. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, an advocate for arms control, and a critic of anti-ballistic-missile defense systems. He was also an outspoken advocate for the exploration of outer space using only unmanned satellites, most notably in his consistent denouncement of Project Mercury and its follow-ups.
- Julius Adams Stratton
Julius Adams Stratton (1901 - 1994) was a U.S. educator. He attended the University of Washington for one year, where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity, then transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1923 and a master's degree in EECS (course 6) in 1926. He served as the president of MIT between 1959 and 1966, after serving the university in several lesser posts, …
- Paul Samuelson
Paul Anthony Samuelson (born May 15, 1915, in Gary, Indiana) is an American neoclassical economist known for his contributions to many fields of economics, beginning with his general statement of the comparative statics method in his 1947 book "Foundations of Economic Analysis". Samuelson was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 1947 and was sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1970, the second year of the Prize.
- Jay Wright Forrester
Jay Wright Forrester (born 14 July 1918, Climax, Nebraska) is a pioneer American computer engineer and systems theorist. Born on a farm near Anselmo, Nebraska, Forrester was educated at MIT in electrical engineering, where he spent his entire career. During the 1940s and early 50s, he did research in electrical and computer engineering, heading the Whirlwind project and developing the "Multi-coordinate digitally information storage device" (coincident-current system), …
- Richard Lindzen
Richard Siegmund Lindzen, Ph.D., (born February 8, 1940) is an atmospheric physicist and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen is known for his research in dynamic meteorology, especially planetary waves. He has been a critic of some anthropogenic global warming theories and the political pressures surrounding climate scientists. He wrote an op-ed for the "Wall Street Journal" in April, 2006, …
- Susumu Tonegawa
Susumu Tonegawa is a Japanese scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for "his discovery of the genetic principle for generation of antibody diversity." Although he won the Nobel Prize for his work in immunology, Tonegawa is a molecular biologist by training. In his later years, he has turned his attention to the molecular and cellular basis of memory formation.
- Barbara Liskov
Barbara Liskov (born Barbara Huberman, 1939), is a prominent computer scientist. She is currently the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her BA in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961, and became the first woman in the United States to be awarded a PhD in Computer Science, in 1968 from Stanford University.
- Ron Rivest
Professor Ronald Lorin Rivest (born 1947, Schenectady, New York) is a cryptographer, and is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Computer Science at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (CSAIL). He is most celebrated for his work on public-key encryption with Len Adleman and Adi Shamir, specifically the RSA algorithm, for which they won the 2002 ACM Turing Award.
- James Crafts
James Mason Crafts (March 8 1839 - 20 June 1917) was an American chemist, most known for developing the Friedel-Crafts alkylation and acylation reactions with Charles Friedel in 1876.
- David P. Reed
David P. Reed is an American computer scientist, educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for a number of significant contributions to computer networking. He was heavily involved in the early development of TCP/IP, and was the designer of the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). He was also one of the authors of the original paper about the end-to-end principle, "End-to-end arguments in system design", published in 1984.
- Greg Papadopoulos
Greg Papadopoulos, Ph.D. is the current Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Sun Microsystems. He is the creator and lead proponent for Redshift, a theory on whether technology markets are over or under-served by Moore's Law. Papadopoulos achieved a B.A. in systems science from the University of California, San Diego, …
- John Guttag
John Guttag is a Professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He has served as that department's Associate Department Head for Computer Science. In January, he will become Department Head. He also heads the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science's Software Devices and Systems Group. This group does research in the areas of computer networks, computer and communications security, and wireless communications.
- Wolfgang Ketterle
Dr. Ketterle received a master's degree from the Technical University of Munich (1982), and a PhD in physics from the University of Munich (1986). After postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, at the University of Heidelberg and at MIT, in 1993 he joined the physics faculty at MIT, where he is now the John D. MacArthur Professor.
- John M. Deutch
John Mark Deutch (born July 27, 1938) was United States Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1995 and Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from May 10, 1995 until December 14, 1996. He is presently an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and serves on the Board of Directors of Citigroup, Cummins, Raytheon, and Schlumberger Ltd. Deutch was born in Brussels, Belgium, to a Russian Jewish father.
- Rodney Brooks
Rodney Allen Brooks (b. December 30, 1954 in Adelaide) is Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is Chief Technical Officer and sits on the Board of iRobot Corp. From July 1, 2003 until June 30, 2007, he was director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; prior to that, he was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
- Joel Moses
Joel Moses (1941 -) is an Israel-born American computer scientist. Joel Moses was born in Israel in 1941 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1954. He received his undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Columbia University and a masters degree in Mathematics, also from Columbia. Under the supervision of Marvin Minsky, Moses received his doctorate in Mathematics at MIT in 1967 with a thesis "Symbolic Integration".
- Robert Solow
Robert Merton Solow (born August 23, 1924) is an American economist particularly known for his work on the theory of economic growth. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal (in 1961) and the 1987 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
- Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Daniel Patrick “Pat” Moynihan was a United States Senator, Ambassador, and eminent sociologist. He was first elected to the United States Senate for New York in 1976, and was re-elected with the Democratic Party three times (in 1982, 1988, and 1994). He declined to run for re-election in 2000. Prior to his years in the Senate, Moynihan was a member of four successive presidential administrations, beginning with the administration of John F. Kennedy, …
- Myron Scholes
Myron S. Scholes, born in Timmins, Ontario, Canada, on July 1, 1941, is one of the authors of the famous Black-Scholes equation. In 1997 he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for "a new method to determine the value of derivatives". The model provides the fundamental conceptual framework for valuing options, such as calls or puts, and is referred to as the Black-Scholes model, which has become the standard in financial markets globally.
- Sherry Turkle
Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a clinical psychologist. Born in New York City, she has focused her research on psychoanalysis and culture and on the psychology of people's relationship with technology, especially computer technology and computer addiction.
- Edgar Schein
Edgar H. Schein (born 1928), a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management has had a notable mark on the field of organizational development in many areas, including career development, group process consultation, and organizational culture. He is generally credited with inventing the term corporate culture. Schein (2004) identifies three distinct levels in organizational cultures; artifacts and behaviours, …
- Charles Marstiller Vest
Charles "Chuck" Marstiller Vest (born 1941) is a U.S. educator and engineer. He served as President of MIT from 1990 until December, 2004. He was succeeded as President by Susan Hockfield. On February 6, 2004, he was appointed to the Iraq Intelligence Commission by President George W. Bush. Prior to his ascension to the MIT presidency, he served as the provost and professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan.
- Frank Wilczek
Frank Wilczek (born May 15, 1951) is a Nobel prize-winning American theoretical physicist. Along with H. David Politzer and David Gross, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction".
- Neil Gershenfeld
Let's start with the development of "personal fabrication." We've already had a digital revolution; we don't need to keep having it. The next big thing in computers will be literally outside the box, as we bring the programmability