The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a
private
Private or privates may refer to:
Music
* " In Private", by Dusty Springfield from the 1990 album ''Reputation''
* Private (band), a Denmark-based band
* "Private" (Ryōko Hirosue song), from the 1999 album ''Private'', written and also recorde ...
land-grant research university in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern
technology
Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, scien ...
and
science, and is one of the most prestigious and highly ranked
academic institutions in the world.
Founded in response to the increasing
industrialization of the United States, MIT adopted a European
polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in
applied science and
engineering
Engineering is the use of scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more speciali ...
. MIT is one of three private land grant universities in the United States, the others being
Cornell University and
Tuskegee University. The institute has an
urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the
Charles River, and encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the
MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Bates Center, and the
Haystack Observatory, as well as affiliated laboratories such as the
Broad and
Whitehead Institute
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is a non-profit research institute located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States that is dedicated to improving human health through basic biomedical research. It was founded as a fiscally indepe ...
s.
,
98 Nobel laureates, 26
Turing Award
The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in compu ...
winners, and 8
Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58
National Medal of Science recipients, 29
National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50
MacArthur Fellows, 83
Marshall Scholars, 41
astronauts, 16
Chief Scientists of the US Air Force, and
numerous heads of states have been affiliated with MIT. The institute also has a strong
entrepreneurial culture and MIT alumni have founded or co-founded
many notable companies. MIT is a member of the
Association of American Universities (AAU) and has received more
Sloan Research Fellowships and
Hertz Fellowship
The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation is an American non-profit organization that awards fellowships to Ph.D. students in the applied physical, biological and engineering sciences. The fellowship provides $250,000 of support over five years. The ...
s than any other university.
History
Foundation and vision
In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the
Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in
Back Bay, Boston for a "
Conservatory of Art and Science", but the proposal failed. A charter for the
incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by
William Barton Rogers, was signed by
John Albion Andrew, the
governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.
Rogers, a graduate of
William and Mary and professor at
UVA, wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a
professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and
liberal education,
[Lewis 1949, p. 8.] proposing that:
The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.
The Rogers Plan reflected the
German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.
Early developments
Two days after MIT was chartered, the
first battle of the
Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT's first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the
Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes" and was a land-grant school.
In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the
Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the
University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.
MIT was informally called "Boston Tech".
The institute adopted the
European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date.
Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President
Francis Amasa Walker.
Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced,
new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.
The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these "Boston Tech" years, MIT faculty and alumni rebuffed
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...
president (and former MIT faculty)
Charles W. Eliot's repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College's
Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard.
In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni.
However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme.
In 1916, the MIT administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge ''Bucentaur'' built for the occasion, to signify MIT's move to a spacious new campus largely consisting of
filled land on a tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The
neoclassical "New Technology" campus was designed by
William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious "Mr. Smith", starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist
George Eastman of
Rochester, New York
Rochester () is a City (New York), city in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York, the county seat, seat of Monroe County, New York, Monroe County, and the fourth-most populous in the state after New York City, Buffalo, New York, Buffalo, ...
, who had invented methods of film production and processing, and founded
Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million ($ million in 2015 dollars) in cash and Kodak stock to MIT.
Curricular reforms
In the 1930s, President
Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively
Provost)
Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios.
The Compton reforms "renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering".
[Lewis 1949, p. 13.] Unlike
Ivy League schools, MIT catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on
tuition than on
endowments or
grants
Grant or Grants may refer to:
Places
*Grant County (disambiguation)
Australia
* Grant, Queensland, a locality in the Barcaldine Region, Queensland, Australia
United Kingdom
*Castle Grant
United States
* Grant, Alabama
* Grant, Inyo County, ...
for its funding. The school was elected to the
Association of American Universities in 1934.
Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at MIT that "the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school", a "partly unjustified" perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities.
[Bourzac, Katherine]
"Rethinking an MIT Education: The faculty reconsiders the General Institute Requirements"
'' Technology Review'', Monday, March 12, 2007 The
School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the
MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of
Science and
Engineering
Engineering is the use of scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more speciali ...
. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs.
The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more
humanistically oriented presidents
Howard W. Johnson
Howard Wesley Johnson (July 2, 1922 – December 12, 2009) was an American educator. He served as dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management between 1959 and 1966, president of MIT between 1966 and 1971, and chairman of the MIT Corporation ( ...
and
Jerome Wiesner
Jerome Bert Wiesner (May 30, 1915 – October 21, 1994) was a professor of electrical engineering, chosen by President John F. Kennedy as chairman of his Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). Educated at the University of Michigan, Wiesner was asso ...
between 1966 and 1980.
Defense research
MIT's involvement in
military science surged during
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
. In 1941,
Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal
Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT.
Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at MIT's
Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the
British military
The British Armed Forces, also known as His Majesty's Armed Forces, are the military forces responsible for the defence of the United Kingdom, its Overseas Territories and the Crown Dependencies. They also promote the UK's wider interests, su ...
in developing
microwave radar
Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance (''ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, Marine radar, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor v ...
. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area.
Other defense projects included
gyroscope-based and other complex
control systems for
gunsight,
bombsight, and
inertial navigation under
Charles Stark Draper's
Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a
digital computer for flight simulations under
Project Whirlwind; and
high-speed and
high-altitude
Altitude or height (also sometimes known as depth) is a distance measurement, usually in the vertical or "up" direction, between a reference datum and a point or object. The exact definition and reference datum varies according to the context ...
photography under
Harold Edgerton
Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton (April 6, 1903 – January 4, 1990), also known as Papa Flash, was an American scientist and researcher, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is largely credited with ...
. By the end of the war, MIT became the nation's largest wartime R&D contractor (attracting some criticism of Bush),
employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone
and receiving in excess of $100 million ($ billion in 2015 dollars) before 1946.
Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war
government-sponsored research at MIT included
SAGE and guidance systems for
ballistic missiles and
Project Apollo.
These activities affected MIT profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of "any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute" to match the return to peacetime, remembering the "academic tranquility of the prewar years", though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the terms of
Karl Taylor Compton, president of MIT between 1930 and 1948;
James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957; and
Julius Adams Stratton
Julius Adams Stratton (May 18, 1901 – June 22, 1994) was a U.S. electrical engineer and university administrator. He attended the University of Washington for one year, where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity, then transferred to th ...
, chancellor from 1952 to 1957, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, MIT no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government.
In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the
Vietnam War and MIT's defense research.
In this period MIT's various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The
Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. MIT ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the
MIT Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities.
Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to "greater strength and unity" after these times of turmoil. However six MIT students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as
Michael Albert and
George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT's role in military research and its suppression of these protests. (
Richard Leacock
Richard Leacock (18 July 192123 March 2011)
The Telegraph (Lon ...
's film, ''November Actions'', records some of these tumultuous events.)
In the 1980s, there was more controversy at MIT over its involvement in SDI (space weaponry) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare) research. More recently, MIT's research for the military has included work on robots, drones and 'battle suits'.
Recent history
MIT has kept pace with and helped to advance the digital age. In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and
networking
Network, networking and networked may refer to:
Science and technology
* Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects
* Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks
Mathematic ...
technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at
Project MAC, the
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the
Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive
computer video game
Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This feedback m ...
s like ''
Spacewar!'' and created much of modern
hacker slang and culture. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980s:
Richard Stallman's
GNU Project and the subsequent
Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980s at the AI Lab; the
MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by
Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology; the
World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the
Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by
Tim Berners-Lee; the
OpenCourseWare
OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means ...
project has made course materials for over 2,000 MIT classes available online free of charge since 2002; and the
One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005.
MIT was named a
sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a
space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several successful
development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus; the
Tang Center for Management Education; several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into
biology,
brain and cognitive sciences,
genomics,
biotechnology, and
cancer research
Cancer research is research into cancer to identify causes and develop strategies for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and cure.
Cancer research ranges from epidemiology, molecular bioscience to the performance of clinical trials to evaluate an ...
; and a number of new "backlot" buildings on Vassar Street including the
Stata Center
The Ray and Maria Stata Center or Building 32 is a 430,000-square-foot (40,000 m2) academic complex designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The building opened for initia ...
. Construction on campus in the 2000s included expansions of the Media Lab, the Sloan School's eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest. In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research Council to investigate the interdisciplinary challenges posed by increasing
global energy consumption
Global means of or referring to a globe and may also refer to:
Entertainment
* ''Global'' (Paul van Dyk album), 2003
* ''Global'' (Bunji Garlin album), 2007
* ''Global'' (Humanoid album), 1989
* ''Global'' (Todd Rundgren album), 2015
* Bruno ...
.
In 2001, inspired by the
open source and
open access movement
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
s, MIT launched
OpenCourseWare
OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means ...
to make the lecture notes,
problem set A problem set, sometimes shortened as pset, is a teaching tool used by many universities. Most courses in physics, math, engineering, chemistry, and computer science will give problem sets on a regular basis. They can also appear in other subjects ...
s, syllabi, exams, and lectures from the great majority of its courses available online for no charge, though without any formal accreditation for coursework completed. While the cost of supporting and hosting the project is high, OCW expanded in 2005 to include other universities as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which currently includes more than 250 academic institutions with content available in at least six languages. In 2011, MIT announced it would offer formal certification (but not credits or degrees) to online participants completing coursework in its "MITx" program, for a modest fee. The "
edX" online platform supporting MITx was initially developed in partnership with
Harvard and its analogous "Harvardx" initiative. The courseware platform is open source, and other universities have already joined and added their own course content. In March 2009 the MIT faculty adopted an
open-access policy to make its scholarship
publicly accessible online.
MIT has its own police force. Three days after the
Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013,
MIT Police patrol officer
Sean Collier
The Boston Marathon bombing was a domestic terrorist attack that took place during the annual Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. Two terrorists, brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, planted two homemade pressure cooker bombs, whi ...
was fatally shot by the suspects
Dzhokhar and
Tamerlan Tsarnaev
Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev (; October 21, 1986 – April 19, 2013)russian: link=no, Тамерла́н Анзо́рович Царна́ев ; ce, Царнаев Анзор-кIант Тамерлан ; ky, Тамерлан Анзор уул ...
, setting off a violent manhunt that shut down the campus and much of the Boston metropolitan area for a day. One week later, Collier's memorial service was attended by more than 10,000 people, in a ceremony hosted by the MIT community with thousands of police officers from the New England region and Canada.
On November 25, 2013, MIT announced the creation of the Collier Medal, to be awarded annually to "an individual or group that embodies the character and qualities that Officer Collier exhibited as a member of the MIT community and in all aspects of his life". The announcement further stated that "Future recipients of the award will include those whose contributions exceed the boundaries of their profession, those who have contributed to building bridges across the community, and those who consistently and selflessly perform acts of kindness".
In September 2017, the school announced the creation of an
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...
research lab called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.
IBM will spend $240 million over the next decade, and the lab will be staffed by MIT and IBM scientists. In October 2018 MIT announced that it would open a new
Schwarzman College of Computing
The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing is a college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Announced in 2018 to address the growing applications of computing technolog ...
dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, named after lead donor and
The Blackstone Group CEO
Stephen Schwarzman. The focus of the new college is to study not just AI, but interdisciplinary AI education, and how AI can be used in fields as diverse as history and biology. The cost of buildings and new faculty for the new college is expected to be $1 billion upon completion.
The
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from
California Institute of Technology, MIT, and industrial contractors, and funded by the
National Science Foundation. It was designed to open the field of
gravitational-wave astronomy
Gravitational-wave astronomy is an emerging branch of observational astronomy which aims to use gravitational waves (minute distortions of spacetime predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity) to collect observational data abo ...
through the detection of
gravitational waves predicted by
general relativity. Gravitational waves were
detected for the first time by the LIGO detector in 2015. For contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, two Caltech physicists,
Kip Thorne and
Barry Barish
Barry Clark Barish (born January 27, 1936) is an American experimental physicist and Nobel Laureate. He is a Linde Professor of Physics, emeritus at California Institute of Technology and a leading expert on gravitational waves.
In 2017, Ba ...
, and MIT physicist
Rainer Weiss won the
Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Weiss, who is also an MIT graduate, designed the laser interferometric technique, which served as the essential blueprint for the LIGO.
Campus
MIT's campus in the city of
Cambridge spans approximately a mile along the north side of the
Charles River basin.
The campus is divided roughly in half by
Massachusetts Avenue, with most dormitories and student life facilities to the west and most academic buildings to the east. The bridge closest to MIT is the
Harvard Bridge, which is known for being marked off in a
non-standard unit of length – the
smoot.
The
Kendall/MIT MBTA Red Line station is located on the northeastern edge of the campus, in
Kendall Square. The Cambridge neighborhoods surrounding MIT are a mixture of high tech companies occupying both modern office and rehabilitated industrial buildings, as well as socio-economically diverse residential neighborhoods.
In early 2016, MIT presented its updated Kendall Square Initiative to the City of Cambridge, with plans for mixed-use educational, retail, residential, startup incubator, and office space in a dense high-rise
transit-oriented development plan.
The
MIT Museum will eventually be moved immediately adjacent to a Kendall Square subway entrance, joining the
List Visual Arts Center
Established in 1950, the List Visual Arts Center (LVAC) is the contemporary art museum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is known for temporary exhibitions in its galleries located in the MIT Media Lab building, as well as its admini ...
on the eastern end of the campus.
Each building at MIT
has a number (possibly preceded by a ''W'', ''N'', ''E'', or ''NW'') designation, and most have a name as well. Typically, academic and office buildings are referred to primarily by number while residence halls are referred to by name. The organization of building numbers roughly corresponds to the order in which the buildings were built and their location relative (north, west, and east) to the original center cluster of Maclaurin buildings.
Many of the buildings are connected above ground as well as through an extensive network of tunnels, providing protection from the Cambridge weather as well as a venue for
roof and tunnel hacking.
MIT's on-campus nuclear reactor is one of the most powerful university-based
nuclear reactors in the United States. The prominence of the reactor's containment building in a densely populated area has been controversial, but MIT maintains that it is well-secured. In 1999
Bill Gates donated US$20 million to MIT for the construction of a computer laboratory named the "William H. Gates Building", and designed by architect
Frank Gehry. While Microsoft had previously given financial support to the institution, this was the first personal donation received from Gates.
MIT Nano, also known as Building 12, is an interdisciplinary facility for nanoscale research. Its
cleanroom and research space, visible through expansive glass facades, is the largest research facility of its kind in the nation. With a cost of US$400 million, it is also one of the costliest buildings on campus. The facility also provides state-of-the-art nanoimaging capabilities with vibration damped imaging and metrology suites sitting atop a slab of concrete underground.
Other notable campus facilities include a pressurized
wind tunnel
Wind tunnels are large tubes with air blowing through them which are used to replicate the interaction between air and an object flying through the air or moving along the ground. Researchers use wind tunnels to learn more about how an aircraft ...
for testing
aerodynamic research, a
towing tank
A ship model basin is a basin or tank used to carry out hydrodynamic tests with ship models, for the purpose of designing a new (full sized) ship, or refining the design of a ship to improve the ship's performance at sea. It can also refer to th ...
for testing ship and ocean structure designs, and previously
Alcator C-Mod, which was the largest fusion device operated by any university. MIT's campus-wide wireless network was completed in the fall of 2005 and consists of nearly 3,000 access points covering of campus.
In 2001, the
Environmental Protection Agency sued MIT for violating the
Clean Water Act and the
Clean Air Act with regard to its
hazardous waste storage and disposal procedures.
MIT settled the suit by paying a $155,000 fine and launching three environmental projects. In connection with capital campaigns to expand the campus, the Institute has also extensively renovated existing buildings to improve their energy efficiency. MIT has also taken steps to reduce its environmental impact by running
alternative fuel campus shuttles, subsidizing
public transportation passes, and building a low-emission
cogeneration plant that serves most of the campus electricity, heating, and cooling requirements.
MIT has substantial
commercial real estate
Commercial property, also called commercial real estate, investment property or income property, is real estate (buildings or land) intended to generate a profit, either from capital gains or rental income. Commercial property includes office ...
holdings in Cambridge on which it pays
property tax
A property tax or millage rate is an ad valorem tax on the value of a property.In the OECD classification scheme, tax on property includes "taxes on immovable property or net wealth, taxes on the change of ownership of property through inher ...
es, plus an additional voluntary
payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) on academic buildings which are legally tax-exempt. , it is the largest taxpayer in the city, contributing approximately 14% of the city's annual revenues.
Holdings include
Technology Square, parts of
Kendall Square, and many properties in
Cambridgeport and
Area 4 neighboring the educational buildings. The land is held for investment purposes and potential long-term expansion.
Architecture
MIT's School of Architecture, now the School of Architecture and Planning, was the first formal architecture program in the United States, and it has a history of commissioning progressive buildings.
The first buildings constructed on the Cambridge campus, completed in 1916, are sometimes called the "Maclaurin buildings" after Institute president
Richard Maclaurin who oversaw their construction. Designed by
William Welles Bosworth, these imposing buildings were built of
reinforced concrete, a first for a non-industrial – much less university – building in the US.
Bosworth's design was influenced by the
City Beautiful Movement of the early 1900s
and features the
Pantheon
Pantheon may refer to:
* Pantheon (religion), a set of gods belonging to a particular religion or tradition, and a temple or sacred building
Arts and entertainment Comics
*Pantheon (Marvel Comics), a fictional organization
* ''Pantheon'' (Lone St ...
-esque Great Dome housing the Barker Engineering Library. The Great Dome overlooks Killian Court, where
graduation ceremonies are held each year. The friezes of the limestone-clad buildings around Killian Court are engraved with the names of important scientists and philosophers. The spacious Building 7 atrium at
77 Massachusetts Avenue is regarded as the entrance to the
Infinite Corridor and the rest of the campus.
Alvar Aalto's Baker House (1947),
Eero Saarinen
Eero Saarinen (, ; August 20, 1910 – September 1, 1961) was a Finnish-American architect and industrial designer noted for his wide-ranging array of designs for buildings and monuments. Saarinen is best known for designing the General Motors ...
's
MIT Chapel and
Kresge Auditorium (1955), and
I.M. Pei's
Green
Green is the color between cyan and yellow on the visible spectrum. It is evoked by light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495570 nm. In subtractive color systems, used in painting and color printing, it is created by a combin ...
, Dreyfus, Landau, and
Wiesner buildings represent high forms of post-war
modernist architecture. More recent buildings like
Frank Gehry's
Stata Center
The Ray and Maria Stata Center or Building 32 is a 430,000-square-foot (40,000 m2) academic complex designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The building opened for initia ...
(2004),
Steven Holl
Steven Holl (born December 9, 1947) is a New York-based American architect and watercolorist. Among his most recognized works are the 2019 REACH expansion of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the 2019 Hunters Point Library in Q ...
's
Simmons Hall (2002),
Charles Correa's Building 46 (2005), and
Fumihiko Maki's Media Lab Extension (2009) stand out among the Boston area's classical architecture and serve as examples of contemporary campus "starchitecture".
These buildings have not always been well received; in 2010, ''
The Princeton Review'' included MIT in a list of twenty schools whose campuses are "tiny, unsightly, or both".
Housing
Undergraduates are guaranteed four-year housing in one of MIT's 11 undergraduate dormitories. Those living on campus can receive support and mentoring from live-in graduate student tutors, resident advisors, and faculty housemasters. Because housing assignments are made based on the preferences of the students themselves, diverse social atmospheres can be sustained in different living groups; for example, according to the ''Yale Daily News'' staff's ''The Insider's Guide to the Colleges, 2010'', "The split between East Campus and West Campus is a significant characteristic of MIT. East Campus has gained a reputation as a thriving counterculture." MIT also has 5 dormitories for single graduate students and 2 apartment buildings on campus for married student families.
MIT has an active Greek and
co-op housing system, including thirty-six
fraternities,
sororities, and independent living groups (
FSILGs). , 98% of all undergraduates lived in MIT-affiliated housing; 54% of the men participated in fraternities and 20% of the women were involved in sororities.
Most FSILGs are located across the river in
Back Bay near where MIT was founded, and there is also a cluster of fraternities on MIT's West Campus that face the Charles River Basin. After the 1997 alcohol-related death of Scott Krueger, a new pledge at the
Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, MIT required all freshmen to live in the dormitory system starting in 2002. Because FSILGs had previously housed as many as 300 freshmen off-campus, the new policy could not be implemented until
Simmons Hall opened in that year.
In 2013–2014, MIT abruptly closed and then demolished undergrad dorm Bexley Hall, citing extensive water damage that made repairs infeasible. In 2017, MIT shut down Senior House after a century of service as an undergrad dorm. That year, MIT administrators released data showing just 60% of Senior House residents had graduated in four years. Campus-wide, the four-year graduation rate is 84% (the cumulative graduation rate is significantly higher).
Organization and administration
MIT is chartered as a non-profit organization and is owned and governed by a privately appointed
board of trustees known as the MIT Corporation. The current board consists of 43 members elected to five-year terms, 25 life members who vote until their 75th birthday, 3 elected officers (President, Treasurer, and Secretary), and 4 ''
ex officio'' members (the president of the alumni association, the
Governor of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Secretary of Education, and the Chief Justice of the
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court). The board is chaired by Diane Greene SM ’78, co-founder and former CEO of VMware and former CEO of Google Cloud. The Corporation approves the budget, new programs, degrees and faculty appointments, and elects the President to serve as the chief executive officer of the university and preside over the Institute's faculty.
MIT's
endowment
Endowment most often refers to:
*A term for human penis size
It may also refer to: Finance
* Financial endowment, pertaining to funds or property donated to institutions or individuals (e.g., college endowment)
*Endowment mortgage, a mortgage to ...
and
other financial assets are managed through a subsidiary called MIT Investment Management Company (MITIMCo). Valued at $16.4 billion in 2018, MIT's endowment was then the
sixth-largest among American colleges and universities.
MIT has five schools (
Science,
Engineering
Engineering is the use of scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more speciali ...
,
Architecture and Planning,
Management
Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business.
Management includes the activitie ...
, and
Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Humanities, arts, and social sciences (HASS) is a broad term used to group together the academic disciplines of humanities, arts and social sciences. It is used as an academic counterpart to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in the ...
) and one college (
Schwarzman College of Computing
The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing is a college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Announced in 2018 to address the growing applications of computing technolog ...
), but no schools of law or medicine.
While faculty committees assert substantial control over many areas of MIT's curriculum, research, student life, and administrative affairs, the chair of each of MIT's 32 academic departments reports to the dean of that department's school, who in turn reports to the Provost under the President. The current president is
L. Rafael Reif, who formerly served as provost under President
Susan Hockfield, the first woman to hold the post.
Sally Kornbluth, a cell biologist and provost at
Duke University will become MIT's 18th president in January 2023.
Academics
MIT is a large, highly residential, research university with a majority of enrollments in graduate and professional programs.
The university has been
accredited by the
New England Association of Schools and Colleges since 1929. MIT operates on a
4–1–4 academic calendar with the fall semester beginning after
Labor Day and ending in mid-December, a 4-week "Independent Activities Period" in the month of January, and the spring semester commencing in early February and ceasing in late May.
MIT students refer to both their majors and classes using numbers or acronyms alone. Departments and their corresponding majors are numbered in the approximate order of their foundation; for example, Civil and Environmental Engineering is , while Linguistics and Philosophy is .
Students majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), the most popular department, collectively identify themselves as "Course 6". MIT students use a combination of the department's course number and the number assigned to the class to identify their subjects; for instance, the introductory calculus-based
classical mechanics course is simply "8.01" at MIT.
Undergraduate program
The four-year, full-time undergraduate program maintains a balance between professional majors and those in the arts and sciences. In 2010, it was dubbed "most selective" by ''
U.S. News'',
admitting few transfer students
and 4.1% of its applicants in the 2020–2021 admissions cycle. MIT offers 44 undergraduate degrees across its five schools. In the 2017–2018 academic year, 1,045 Bachelor of Science degrees (abbreviated "
SB") were granted, the only type of undergraduate degree MIT now awards.
In the 2011 fall term, among students who had designated a major, the School of Engineering was the most popular division, enrolling 63% of students in its 19 degree programs, followed by the School of Science (29%), School of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences (3.7%), Sloan School of Management (3.3%), and School of Architecture and Planning (2%). The largest undergraduate degree programs were in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (), Computer Science and Engineering (), Mechanical Engineering (), Physics (), and Mathematics ().
All undergraduates are required to complete a core curriculum called the General Institute Requirements (GIRs).
The Science Requirement, generally completed during freshman year as prerequisites for classes in science and engineering majors, comprises two semesters of physics, two semesters of calculus, one semester of chemistry, and one semester of biology. There is a Laboratory Requirement, usually satisfied by an appropriate class in a course major. The Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) Requirement consists of eight semesters of classes in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, including at least one semester from each division as well as the courses required for a designated concentration in a HASS division. Under the Communication Requirement, two of the HASS classes, plus two of the classes taken in the designated major must be "communication-intensive",
including "substantial instruction and practice in oral presentation".
Finally, all students are required to complete a
swimming test; non-varsity athletes must also take four quarters of
physical education classes.
Most classes rely on a combination of lectures, recitations led by associate professors or graduate students, weekly problem sets ("p-sets"), and periodic quizzes or tests. While the pace and difficulty of MIT coursework has been compared to "drinking from a fire hose", the freshmen retention rate at MIT is similar to other research universities.
The "pass/no-record" grading system relieves some pressure for first-year undergraduates. For each class taken in the fall term, freshmen transcripts will either report only that the class was passed, or otherwise not have any record of it. In the spring term, passing grades (A, B, C) appear on the transcript while non-passing grades are again not recorded.
(Grading had previously been "pass/no record" all freshman year, but was amended for the Class of 2006 to prevent students from
gaming the system by completing required major classes in their freshman year.) Also, freshmen may choose to join alternative learning communities, such as
Experimental Study Group,
Concourse
A concourse is a place where pathways or roads meet, such as in a hotel, a convention center, a railway station, an airport terminal, a hall, or other space.
The term is not limited to places where there are literally pathways or roadways or t ...
, or Terrascope.
In 1969,
Margaret MacVicar founded the
Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program
An Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program provides funding and/or credit to undergraduate students who volunteer for faculty-mentored research projects pertaining to all academic disciplines.
Participating universities
Universities involve ...
(UROP) to enable undergraduates to collaborate directly with faculty members and researchers. Students join or initiate research projects ("UROPs") for academic credit, pay, or on a volunteer basis through postings on the UROP website or by contacting faculty members directly. A substantial majority of undergraduates participate. Students often become
published, file
patent applications, and/or launch
start-up companies based upon their experience in UROPs.
In 1970, the then-Dean of Institute Relations, Benson R. Snyder, published ''
The Hidden Curriculum,'' arguing that education at MIT was often slighted in favor of following a set of unwritten expectations and that graduating with good grades was more often the product of figuring out the system rather than a solid education. The successful student, according to Snyder, was the one who was able to discern which of the formal requirements were to be ignored in favor of which unstated norms. For example, organized student groups had compiled "
course bibles"—collections of problem-set and examination questions and answers for later students to use as references. This sort of gamesmanship, Snyder argued, hindered development of a creative intellect and contributed to student discontent and unrest.
Graduate program
MIT's graduate program has high coexistence with the undergraduate program, and many courses are taken by qualified students at both levels. MIT offers a comprehensive doctoral program with degrees in the humanities, social sciences, and
STEM fields as well as professional degrees, including the Master of Business Administration (MBA).
The Institute offers graduate programs leading to academic degrees such as the Master of Science (which is abbreviated as SM at MIT), various Engineer's Degrees, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), and Doctor of Science (ScD) and interdisciplinary graduate programs such as the
MD-PhD (with
Harvard Medical School) and a joint program in
oceanography with
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Admission to graduate programs is decentralized; applicants apply directly to the department or degree program. More than 90% of doctoral students are supported by fellowships, research assistantships (RAs), or teaching assistantships (TAs).
MIT Bootcamps
MIT Bootcamps are intense week-long innovation and leadership programs that challenge participants to develop a venture in a week. Each Bootcamp centers around a particular topic, specific to an industry, leadership skill set, or emerging technology. Cohorts are organized into small teams who work on an entrepreneurial project together, in addition to individual learning and team coaching. The program includes a series of online seminars with MIT faculty, practitioners, and industry experts, innovation workshops with bootcamp instructors focused on putting the theory participants have learned into practice, coaching sessions, and informal office hours for learners to exchange ideas freely. Bootcampers are tasked with weekly "deliverables," which are key elements of a business plan, to help guide the group through the decision-making process involved in building an enterprise. The experience culminates in a final pitch session, judged by a panel of experts.
MIT Bootcamp instructors include
Eric von Hippel
Eric von Hippel (born August 27, 1941) is an American economist and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, specializing in the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He is best known for his work in developing the ...
,
Sanjay Sarma
Sanjay E. Sarma (born May 1968) an Indian mechanical engineer who is the Fred Fort Flowers (1941) and Daniel Fort Flowers (1941) professor of mechanical engineering and the Vice President for Open Learning at Massachusetts Institute of Technolog ...
,
Erdin Beshimov, and
Bill Aulet. MIT Bootcamps were founded by
Erdin Beshimov.
Rankings
MIT places among the top five in many overall rankings of universities (see table right) and rankings based on students'
revealed preferences.
For several years, ''
U.S. News & World Report'', the
QS World University Rankings
''QS World University Rankings'' is an annual publication of university rankings by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). The QS system comprises three parts: the global overall ranking, the subject rankings (which name the world's top universities for th ...
, and the
Academic Ranking of World Universities have ranked MIT's School of Engineering first, as did the 1995
National Research Council report.
In the same lists, MIT's strongest showings apart from in engineering are in computer science, the natural sciences, business, architecture, economics, linguistics, mathematics, and, to a lesser extent, political science and philosophy.
Times Higher Education has recognized MIT as one of the world's "six super brands" on its ''World Reputation Rankings'', along with
Berkeley,
Cambridge,
Harvard,
Oxford, and
Stanford. In 2019, it was ranked #3 among the universities around the world by
SCImago Institutions Rankings. In 2017, the
Times Higher Education World University Rankings also rated MIT the #2 university for arts and humanities.
MIT was ranked #7 in 2015 and #6 in 2017 of the Nature Index Annual Tables, which measure the largest contributors to papers published in 82 leading journals.
Georgetown University researchers ranked MIT #3 in the US for 20-year
return on investment.
Collaborations
The university historically pioneered research and training collaborations between academia, industry and government. In 1946, President Compton, Harvard Business School professor
Georges Doriot, and Massachusetts Investor Trust chairman Merrill Grisswold founded
American Research and Development Corporation, the first American
venture-capital
Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which hav ...
firm. In 1948, Compton established the MIT Industrial Liaison Program. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, American politicians and business leaders accused MIT and other universities of contributing to a
declining economy by
transferring taxpayer-funded research and technology to international – especially
Japanese – firms that were competing with struggling American businesses. On the other hand, MIT's extensive collaboration with the federal government on research projects has led to several MIT leaders serving as
presidential scientific advisers since 1940. MIT established a Washington Office in 1991 to continue effective
lobbying for research funding and national
science policy.
The
US Justice Department began an investigation in 1989, and in 1991 filed an
antitrust suit against MIT, the eight
Ivy League colleges, and eleven other institutions for allegedly engaging in
price-fixing
Price fixing is an anticompetitive agreement between participants on the same side in a market to buy or sell a product, service, or commodity only at a fixed price, or maintain the market conditions such that the price is maintained at a given ...
during their annual "Overlap Meetings", which were held to prevent bidding wars over promising prospective students from consuming funds for need-based scholarships. While the Ivy League institutions
settled
A settler is a person who has migrated to an area and established a permanent residence there, often to colonize the area.
A settler who migrates to an area previously uninhabited or sparsely inhabited may be described as a pioneer.
Settle ...
, MIT contested the charges, arguing that the practice was not anti-competitive because it ensured the availability of aid for the greatest number of students.
MIT ultimately prevailed when the Justice Department dropped the case in 1994.
MIT's proximity
[MIT's Building 7 and Harvard's Johnston Gate, the traditional entrances to each school, are apart along Massachusetts Avenue.] to
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...
("the other school up the
river
A river is a natural flowing watercourse, usually freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, sea, lake or another river. In some cases, a river flows into the ground and becomes dry at the end of its course without reaching another body of ...
") has led to a substantial number of research collaborations such as the
Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and the
Broad Institute
The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (IPA: , pronunciation respelling: ), often referred to as the Broad Institute, is a biomedical and genomic research center located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The insti ...
.
In addition, students at the two schools can
cross-register for credits toward their own school's degrees without any additional fees.
A cross-registration program between MIT and
Wellesley College has also existed since 1969, and in 2002 the
Cambridge–MIT Institute launched an undergraduate exchange program between MIT and the
University of Cambridge.
MIT also has a long-term partnership with
Imperial College London, for both student exchanges and research collaboration. More modest cross-registration programs have been established with
Boston University
Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original cam ...
,
Brandeis University
, mottoeng = "Truth even unto its innermost parts"
, established =
, type = Private research university
, accreditation = NECHE
, president = Ronald D. Liebowitz
, p ...
,
Tufts University,
Massachusetts College of Art, and the
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
MIT maintains substantial research and faculty ties with independent research organizations in the Boston area, such as the
Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, the
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Ongoing international research and educational collaborations include th
Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute) Singapore-MIT Alliance, MIT-
Politecnico di Milano,
MIT-
Zaragoza
Zaragoza, also known in English as Saragossa,''Encyclopædia Britannica'"Zaragoza (conventional Saragossa)" is the capital city of the Province of Zaragoza, Zaragoza Province and of the autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community of Ara ...
International Logistics Program, and projects in other countries through the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) program.
The mass-market magazine ''
Technology Review'' is published by MIT through a subsidiary company, as is a special edition that also serves as an
alumni magazine
__NOTOC__
An alumni magazine is a magazine published by a university, college, or other school or by an association of a school's alumni (and sometimes current students) in order to keep alumni abreast of fellow alumni and news of their universi ...
. The
MIT Press
The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962.
History
The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publ ...
is a major
university press, publishing over 200 books and 30 journals annually, emphasizing science and technology as well as arts, architecture, new media, current events, and social issues.
Libraries, collections, and museums
The MIT library system consists of five subject libraries: Barker (Engineering), Dewey (Economics), Hayden (Humanities and Science), Lewis (Music), and Rotch (Arts and Architecture). There are also various specialized libraries and archives. The libraries contain more than 2.9 million printed volumes, 2.4 million microforms, 49,000 print or electronic journal subscriptions, and 670 reference databases. The past decade has seen a trend of increased focus on digital over print resources in the libraries. Notable collections include the Lewis Music Library with an emphasis on 20th and 21st-century music and electronic music, the
List Visual Arts Center
Established in 1950, the List Visual Arts Center (LVAC) is the contemporary art museum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is known for temporary exhibitions in its galleries located in the MIT Media Lab building, as well as its admini ...
's rotating exhibitions of contemporary art, and the Compton Gallery's cross-disciplinary exhibitions. MIT allocates a percentage of the budget for all new construction and renovation to commission and support its extensive public art and outdoor sculpture collection.
The
MIT Museum was founded in 1971 and collects, preserves, and exhibits artifacts significant to the culture and
history of MIT. The museum now engages in significant educational outreach programs for the general public, including the annual
Cambridge Science Festival, the first celebration of this kind in the United States. Since 2005, its official mission has been, "to engage the wider community with MIT's science, technology and other areas of scholarship in ways that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century".
Research
MIT was elected to the
Association of American Universities in 1934 and is
classified
Classified may refer to:
General
*Classified information, material that a government body deems to be sensitive
*Classified advertising or "classifieds"
Music
*Classified (rapper) (born 1977), Canadian rapper
* The Classified, a 1980s American ro ...
among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity";
research expenditures totaled $952 million in 2017. The federal government was the largest source of sponsored research, with the
Department of Health and Human Services granting $255.9 million,
Department of Defense Department of Defence or Department of Defense may refer to:
Current departments of defence
* Department of Defence (Australia)
* Department of National Defence (Canada)
* Department of Defence (Ireland)
* Department of National Defense (Philipp ...
$97.5 million,
Department of Energy $65.8 million,
National Science Foundation $61.4 million, and
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeedin ...
$27.4 million.
MIT employs approximately 1300 researchers in addition to faculty.
In 2011, MIT faculty and researchers disclosed 632 inventions, were issued 153 patents, earned $85.4 million in cash income, and received $69.6 million in royalties. Through programs like the Deshpande Center, MIT faculty leverage their research and discoveries into multi-million-dollar commercial ventures.
In electronics,
magnetic-core memory,
radar
Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance (''ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, Marine radar, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor v ...
,
single-electron transistor
A single-electron transistor (SET) is a sensitive electronic device based on the Coulomb blockade effect. In this device the electrons flow through a tunnel junction between source/drain to a quantum dot (conductive island). Moreover, the electric ...
s, and
inertial guidance controls were invented or substantially developed by MIT researchers.
Harold Eugene Edgerton was a pioneer in
high-speed photography and
sonar
Sonar (sound navigation and ranging or sonic navigation and ranging) is a technique that uses sound propagation (usually underwater, as in submarine navigation) to navigate, measure distances (ranging), communicate with or detect objects on o ...
.
Claude E. Shannon developed much of modern
information theory and discovered the application of
Boolean logic to
digital circuit design theory. In the domain of computer science, MIT faculty and researchers made fundamental contributions to
cybernetics,
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...
,
computer languages,
machine learning,
robotics, and
cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adv ...
.
At least nine
Turing Award
The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in compu ...
laureates and seven recipients of the
Draper Prize in engineering have been or are currently associated with MIT.
Current and previous physics faculty have won eight
Nobel Prizes,
four
Dirac Medals, and three
Wolf Prizes predominantly for their contributions to subatomic and
quantum theory. Members of the chemistry department have been awarded three
Nobel Prizes and one Wolf Prize for the discovery of novel syntheses and methods.
MIT biologists have been awarded six
Nobel Prizes for their contributions to genetics, immunology, oncology, and molecular biology.
Professor
Eric Lander
Eric Steven Lander (born February 3, 1957) is an American mathematician and geneticist who served as the 11th director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to the President, serving on the presidential Cabinet. ...
was one of the principal leaders of the
Human Genome Project.
Positronium atoms, synthetic
penicillin,
synthetic self-replicating molecules, and the genetic bases for
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease) and
Huntington's disease were first discovered at MIT.
Jerome Lettvin transformed the study of cognitive science with his paper "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain". Researchers developed a system to convert MRI scans into 3D printed physical models.
In the domain of humanities, arts, and social sciences, as of October 2019 MIT economists have been awarded seven
Nobel Prizes and nine
John Bates Clark Medals.
Linguists
Noam Chomsky and
Morris Halle authored seminal texts on
generative grammar and
phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
. The
MIT Media Lab, founded in 1985 within the
School of Architecture and Planning and known for its unconventional research, has been home to influential researchers such as
constructivist educator and
Logo creator
Seymour Papert.
Spanning many of the above fields,
MacArthur Fellowships (the so-called "Genius Grants") have been awarded to 50 people associated with MIT.
Five
Pulitzer Prize–winning writers currently work at or have retired from MIT.
Four current or former faculty are members of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Allegations of
research misconduct or improprieties have received substantial press coverage. Professor
David Baltimore, a
Nobel Laureate, became embroiled in a misconduct investigation starting in 1986 that led to Congressional hearings in 1991.
Professor
Ted Postol has accused the MIT administration since 2000 of attempting to
whitewash
Whitewash, or calcimine, kalsomine, calsomine, or lime paint is a type of paint made from slaked lime (calcium hydroxide, Ca(OH)2) or chalk calcium carbonate, (CaCO3), sometimes known as "whiting". Various other additives are sometimes used.
...
potential research misconduct at the Lincoln Lab facility involving a
ballistic missile defense test, though a final investigation into the matter has not been completed. Associate Professor
Luk Van Parijs was dismissed in 2005 following allegations of scientific misconduct and found guilty of the same by the
United States Office of Research Integrity
The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) is a U.S. government agency that focuses on research integrity, especially in health. It was created when the Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI) in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Office of ...
in 2009.
In 2019,
Clarivate Analytics named 54 members of MIT's faculty to its list of "Highly Cited Researchers". That number places MIT eighth among the world's universities.
Discoveries and innovation
Natural sciences
*
Oncogene –
Robert Weinberg discovered genetic basis of human
cancer.
*
Reverse transcription –
David Baltimore independently isolated, in 1970 at MIT, two RNA tumor viruses:
R-MLV and again
RSV.
*
Thermal death time –
Samuel Cate Prescott and
William Lyman Underwood from 1895 to 1898. Done for
canning of food. Applications later found useful in
medical devices
A medical device is any device intended to be used for medical purposes. Significant potential for hazards are inherent when using a device for medical purposes and thus medical devices must be proved safe and effective with reasonable assura ...
,
pharmaceuticals, and
cosmetics
Cosmetics are constituted mixtures of chemical compounds derived from either natural sources, or synthetically created ones. Cosmetics have various purposes. Those designed for personal care and skin care can be used to cleanse or protec ...
.
Computer and applied sciences
*
Akamai Technologies –
Daniel Lewin
Daniel Mark Lewin ( he, דניאל "דני" מארק לוין; May 14, 1970 – September 11, 2001), sometimes spelled Levin, was an American–Israeli mathematician and entrepreneur who co-founded internet company Akamai Technologies. A pas ...
and
Tom Leighton developed a faster
content delivery network, now one of the world's largest
distributed computing platforms, responsible for serving between 15 and 30 percent of all web traffic.
*
Cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adv ...
– MIT researchers
Ron Rivest,
Adi Shamir and
Leonard Adleman developed one of the first practical
public-key cryptosystems, the
RSA cryptosystem, and started a company,
RSA Security.
*
Digital circuits
Digital electronics is a field of electronics involving the study of digital signals and the engineering of devices that use or produce them. This is in contrast to analog electronics and analog signals.
Digital electronic circuits are usual ...
–
Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as a "father of information theory".
As a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts I ...
, while a master's degree student at MIT, developed the digital circuit design theory which paved the way for modern computers.
*
Electronic ink – developed by
Joseph Jacobson at
MIT Media Lab.
*
Emacs (text editor) – development began during the 1970s at the
MIT AI Lab
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...
.
*
Flight recorder (black box) –
Charles Stark Draper developed the black box at
MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory. That lab later made the
Apollo Moon landings possible through the
Apollo Guidance Computer it designed for
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeedin ...
.
*
GNU Project –
Richard Stallman formally founded the
free software movement in 1983 by launching the
GNU Project at MIT.
*
Julia (programming language) – Development was started in 2009, by
Jeff Bezanson,
Stefan Karpinski,
Viral B. Shah, and
Alan Edelman, all at MIT at that time, and continued with the contribution of a dedicated MIT Julia Lab
*
Lisp (programming language) –
John McCarthy invented Lisp at MIT in 1958.
*
Lithium-ion battery efficiencies – Yet-Ming Chiang and his group at MIT showed a substantial improvement in the performance of lithium batteries by boosting the material's conductivity by
doping it with
aluminium
Aluminium (aluminum in American and Canadian English) is a chemical element with the symbol Al and atomic number 13. Aluminium has a density lower than those of other common metals, at approximately one third that of steel. It ha ...
,
niobium and
zirconium.
*
Macsyma, one of the oldest general-purpose computer algebra systems; the GPL-licensed version
Maxima remains in wide use.
[. See also ]
*
MIT OpenCourseWare – the
OpenCourseWare
OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means ...
movement started in 1999 when the
University of Tübingen in Germany published videos of
lectures online for its ''timms'' initiative (Tübinger Internet Multimedia Server).
The OCW movement only took off, however, with the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare and the Open Learning Initiative at
Carnegie Mellon University in October 2002. The movement was soon reinforced by the launch of similar projects at
Yale,
Utah State University, the
University of Michigan and the
University of California Berkeley.
*
Perdix micro-drone – autonomous drone that uses
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...
to swarm with many other Perdix drones.
*
Project MAC – groundbreaking research in
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...
s,
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...
, and the
theory of computation.
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the A ...
funded project.
*
Radar
Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance (''ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, Marine radar, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor v ...
– developed at MIT's
Radiation Laboratory during
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
.
*
SKETCHPAD – invented by
Ivan Sutherland at MIT (presented in his PhD thesis). It pioneered the way for
human–computer interaction (HCI).
Sketchpad is considered to be the ancestor of modern
computer-aided design (CAD) programs as well as a major breakthrough in the development of
computer graphics
Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...
in general.
*
VisiCalc – first
spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in ...
computer program for
personal computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or te ...
s, originally released for the
Apple II by
VisiCorp. MIT alumni
Dan Bricklin and
Bob Frankston rented time sharing at night on an MIT mainframe computer (that cost $1/hr for use).
*
World Wide Web Consortium – founded in 1994 by
Tim Berners-Lee, (W3C) is the main international
standards organization for the
World Wide Web
*
X Window System – pioneering architecture-independent system for graphical user interfaces that has been widely used for
Unix
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...
and
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...
systems.
Companies and entrepreneurship
MIT alumni and faculty have founded numerous companies, some of which are shown below:
*
Analog Devices, 1965, co-founders
Ray Stata
Raymond Stuart Stata (born 1934) is an American entrepreneur, engineer, and investor.
Early life and education
Stata was born on November 12, 1934 in the small farming community of Oxford, Pennsylvania to Rhoda Pearl Buchanan and Raymond Stanfo ...
, (SB, SM) and Matthew Lorber (SB)
*
BlackRock, 1988, co-founder Bennett Golub, (SB, SM, PhD)
*
Bose Corporation, 1964, founder
Amar Bose
Amar Gopal Bose (November 2, 1929 – July 12, 2013) was an American entrepreneur and academic. An electrical engineer and sound engineer, he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for over 45 years. He was also the foun ...
(SB, PhD)
*
Buzzfeed, 2006, co-founder
Jonah Peretti
Jonah H. Peretti (born January 1, 1974) is an Internet entrepreneur, a co-founder and the CEO of BuzzFeed, co-founder of '' The Huffington Post'', and developer of reblogging under the project "Reblog".
Education and early career
Peretti was b ...
(SM)
*
Dropbox, 2007, founders
Drew Houston (SB) and
Arash Ferdowsi
Arash Ferdowsi ( fa, آرش فردوسی, born October 7, 1985) is an Iranian American, Iranian-American billionaire entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of Dropbox (service), Dropbox.
Early life and education
Ferdowsi was born in Overland Park, K ...
(drop-out)
*
Hewlett-Packard, 1939, co-founder
William R. Hewlett (SM)
*''
HuffPost
''HuffPost'' (formerly ''The Huffington Post'' until 2017 and sometimes abbreviated ''HuffPo'') is an American progressive news website, with localized and international editions. The site offers news, satire, blogs, and original content, and ...
,'' 2005, co-founder
Jonah Peretti
Jonah H. Peretti (born January 1, 1974) is an Internet entrepreneur, a co-founder and the CEO of BuzzFeed, co-founder of '' The Huffington Post'', and developer of reblogging under the project "Reblog".
Education and early career
Peretti was b ...
(SM)
*
Intel, 1968, co-founder
Robert Noyce (PhD)
*
Koch Industries, 1940, founder
Fred C. Koch
Fred Chase Koch ( ; September 23, 1900 – November 17, 1967) was an American chemical engineer and entrepreneur who founded the oil refinery firm that later became Koch Industries, a privately held company which -- under the principal owner ...
(SB), sons
William (SB, PhD),
David
David (; , "beloved one") (traditional spelling), , ''Dāwūd''; grc-koi, Δαυΐδ, Dauíd; la, Davidus, David; gez , ዳዊት, ''Dawit''; xcl, Դաւիթ, ''Dawitʿ''; cu, Давíдъ, ''Davidŭ''; possibly meaning "beloved one". w ...
(SB)
*
Qualcomm, 1985, co-founders
Irwin M. Jacobs (SM, PhD) and
Andrew Viterbi
Andrew James Viterbi (born Andrea Giacomo Viterbi, March 9, 1935) is an American electrical engineer and businessman who co-founded Qualcomm Inc. and invented the Viterbi algorithm. He is the Presidential Chair Professor of Electrical Engineer ...
(SB, SM)
*
Raytheon, 1922, co-founder
Vannevar Bush (DEng, Professor)
*
Renaissance Technologies, 1982, founder
James Simons
James Harris Simons (; born 25 April 1938) is an American mathematician, billionaire hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. He is the founder of Renaissance Technologies, a quantitative hedge fund based in East Setauket, New York. He and his f ...
(SB)
*
Texas Instruments, 1930, founder
Cecil Howard Green
Cecil Howard Green (August 6, 1900 – April 11, 2003) was a British-born American geophysicist, electrical engineer, and electronics manufacturing executive, who trained at the University of British Columbia and the Massachusetts Institute of Tec ...
(SB, SM)
*
TSMC, 1987, founder
Morris Chang (SB, SM)
*
VMware, 1998, co-founder
Diane Greene
Diane B. Greene (born June 9, 1955) is an American technology entrepreneur and executive. Greene started her career as a naval architect before transitioning to the tech industry, where she was a founder and CEO of VMware from 1998 until 2008. ...
(SM)
Traditions and student activities
The faculty and student body place a high value on
meritocracy and on technical proficiency. MIT has never awarded an
honorary degree
An honorary degree is an academic degree for which a university (or other degree-awarding institution) has waived all of the usual requirements. It is also known by the Latin phrases ''honoris causa'' ("for the sake of the honour") or '' ad h ...
, nor does it award
athletic scholarships,
'' ad eundem'' degrees, or
Latin honors upon graduation. However, MIT has twice awarded honorary professorships: to
Winston Churchill in 1949 and
Salman Rushdie in 1993.
Many
upperclass students and alumni wear a large, heavy, distinctive
class ring known as the "
Brass Rat
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's class ring, often called the Brass Rat, is a commemorative ring for the graduating class of students at MIT. The ring is redesigned each year by a committee of MIT students. The class ring has three main se ...
".
Originally created in 1929, the ring's official name is the "Standard Technology Ring". The undergraduate ring design (a separate graduate student version exists as well) varies slightly from year to year to reflect the unique character of the MIT experience for that class, but always features a three-piece design, with the MIT seal and the class year each appearing on a separate face, flanking a large rectangular bezel bearing an image of a
beaver.
The
initialism IHTFP, representing the informal school motto "I Hate This Fucking Place" and jocularly
euphemized as "I Have Truly Found Paradise", "Institute Has The Finest Professors", "Institute of Hacks, TomFoolery and Pranks", "It's Hard to Fondle Penguins", and other variations, has occasionally been featured on the ring given its historical prominence in student culture.
Caltech Rivalry
MIT also shares a well-known
rivalry with the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech), stemming from both institutions' reputations as two of the highest ranked and most highly recognized science and engineering schools in the world. The rivalry is an unusual college rivalry given its focus on academics and pranks instead of sports, and due to the geographic distance between the two (their campuses are separated by about 2970 miles and are on
opposite coasts of the United States). In 2005, Caltech students pranked MIT's Campus Preview Weekend by distributing t-shirts that read "MIT" on the front, and "...because not everyone can go to Caltech" on the back.
Additionally, the word Massachusetts in the "Massachusetts Institute of Technology" engraving on the exterior of the Lobby 7 dome was covered with a banner so that it read "That Other Institute of Technology." In 2006, MIT retaliated by posing as contractors and stealing the 1.7-ton, 130-year-old
Fleming cannon, a Caltech landmark. The cannon was relocated to Cambridge, where it was displayed in front of the
Green Building during the 2006 Campus Preview Weekend. In September 2010, MIT students unsuccessfully tried to place a life-sized model of the
TARDIS time machine from the ''
Doctor Who'' (1963–present) television series on top of Baxter Hall at Caltech. A few months later, Caltech students collaborated to help MIT students place the TARDIS on top of their originally planned destination. The rivalry has continued, most recently in 2014, when a group of Caltech students gave out mugs sporting the MIT logo on the front and the words "The Institute of Technology" on the back. When heated, the mugs turned orange and read, "Caltech, The Hotter Institute of Technology."
Activities
MIT has over 500 recognized student activity groups, including a
campus radio station, ''
The Tech'' student newspaper, an annual
entrepreneurship competition, a
crime club, and weekly screenings of popular films by the
Lecture Series Committee. Less traditional activities include the "world's largest open-shelf
collection of science fiction" in English, a
model railroad club, and a vibrant
folk dance scene. Students, faculty, and staff are involved in over 50 educational outreach and public service programs through the
MIT Museum, Edgerton Center, and MIT Public Service Center.
Fraternities and sororities provide a base of activities in addition to housing. Approximately 1,000 undergrads, 48% of men and 30% of women, participate in one of several dozen Greek Life men's, women's and co-ed chapters on the campus.
The
Independent Activities Period is a four-week-long "term" offering hundreds of optional classes, lectures, demonstrations, and other activities throughout the month of January between the Fall and Spring semesters. Some of the most popular recurring IAP activities are Autonomous Robot Design (course 6.270), Robocraft Programming (6.370), and MasLab
competitions,
the annual
"mystery hunt",
and
Charm School.
More than 250 students pursue
externships annually at companies in the US and abroad.
Many MIT students also engage in "hacking", which encompasses both the
physical exploration of areas that are generally off-limits (such as rooftops and steam tunnels), as well as
elaborate practical jokes. Examples of high-profile hacks have included the
abduction of Caltech's cannon, reconstructing a
Wright Flyer atop the Great Dome, and adorning the
John Harvard statue with the
Master Chief's Mjölnir Helmet.
Athletics
MIT sponsors 31 varsity sports and has one of the three broadest NCAA Division III athletic programs.
MIT participates in the
NCAA's Division III, the
New England Women's and Men's Athletic Conference, the
New England Football Conference,
NCAA's Division I
Patriot League for women's crew, and the
Collegiate Water Polo Association (CWPA) for Men's Water Polo. Men's crew competes outside the NCAA in the
Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges (EARC). The intercollegiate sports teams, called the MIT Engineers won 22 Team National Championships, 42 Individual National Championships. MIT is the all-time Division III leader in producing
Academic All-Americas (302) and rank second across all NCAA Divisions only behind the University of Nebraska. MIT Athletes won 13
Elite 90 awards and ranks first among NCAA Division III programs, and third among all divisions. In April 2009, budget cuts led to MIT eliminating eight of its 41 sports, including the mixed men's and women's teams in alpine skiing and pistol; separate teams for men and women in ice hockey and gymnastics; and men's programs in golf and wrestling.
People
Students
MIT enrolled 4,602 undergraduates and 6,972 graduate students in 2018–2019. Undergraduate and graduate students came from all 50 US states as well as from 115 foreign countries.
MIT received 33,240 applications for admission to the undergraduate Class of 2025: it admitted 1,365 (4.1 percent). In 2019, 29,114 applications were received for graduate and advanced degree programs across all departments; 3,670 were admitted (12.6 percent) and 2,312 enrolled (63 percent).
Undergraduate tuition and fees for 2019-2020 was $53,790 for nine months. 59% of students were awarded a need-based MIT scholarship. Graduate tuition and fees for 2019-2020 was also $53,790 for nine months, and summer tuition was $17,800. Financial support for graduate students are provided in large part by individual departments. They include fellowships, traineeships, teaching and research assistantships, and loans. The annual increase in expenses had led to a student tradition (dating back to the 1960s) of tongue-in-cheek "tuition riots".
MIT has been nominally
co-education
Mixed-sex education, also known as mixed-gender education, co-education, or coeducation (abbreviated to co-ed or coed), is a system of education where males and females are educated together. Whereas single-sex education was more common up to ...
al since admitting
Ellen Swallow Richards
Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (December 3, 1842 – March 30, 1911) was an American industrial and safety engineer, environmental chemist, and university faculty member in the United States during the 19th century. Her pioneering work i ...
in 1870. Richards also became the first female member of MIT's faculty, specializing in
sanitary chemistry.
Female students remained a small minority prior to the completion of the first wing of a women's dormitory,
McCormick Hall, in 1963. Between 1993 and 2009 the proportion of women rose from 34 percent to 45 percent of undergraduates and from 20 percent to 31 percent of graduate students.
, women outnumbered men in Biology, Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Architecture, Urban Planning, and Biological Engineering.
Faculty and staff
, MIT had 1,069
faculty
Faculty may refer to:
* Faculty (academic staff), the academic staff of a university (North American usage)
* Faculty (division)
A faculty is a division within a university or college comprising one subject area or a group of related subject ...
members.
Faculty are responsible for lecturing classes, for advising both graduate and undergraduate students, and for sitting on academic committees, as well as for conducting original research. Between 1964 and 2009 a total of seventeen faculty and staff members affiliated with MIT won
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfr ...
s (thirteen of them in the latter 25 years). As of October 2020, 37 MIT faculty members, past or present, have won Nobel Prizes, the majority in
Economics or
Physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which ...
.
, current faculty and teaching staff included 67
Guggenheim Fellow
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
s, 6
Fulbright Scholars, and 22
MacArthur Fellows.
Faculty members who have made extraordinary contributions to their research field as well as the MIT community are granted appointments as
Institute Professors for the remainder of their tenures.
Susan Hockfield, a molecular
neurobiologist, served as MIT's president from 2004 to 2012. She was the first woman to hold the post.
MIT faculty members have often been recruited to lead other colleges and universities. Founding faculty-member
Charles W. Eliot became president of Harvard University in 1869, a post he would hold for 40 years, during which he wielded considerable influence both on American higher education and on secondary education. MIT alumnus and faculty member
George Ellery Hale played a central role in the development of the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and other faculty members have been key founders of
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
Olin College of Engineering, officially Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, is a private college focused on engineering and located in Needham, Massachusetts. Olin College is noted in the engineering community for its relatively recent fou ...
in nearby
Needham, Massachusetts.
former provost
Robert A. Brown
Robert A. Brown (born July 22, 1951) is the 10th president of Boston University. He was formerly the provost of MIT.
In 1991, Brown was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for the application of computing techniques to ...
served as president of
Boston University
Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original cam ...
; former provost
Mark Wrighton is chancellor of
Washington University in St. Louis; former associate provost
Alice Gast is president of
Lehigh University; and former professor
Suh Nam-pyo is president of
KAIST. Former dean of the School of Science
Robert J. Birgeneau was the chancellor of the
University of California, Berkeley (2004–2013); former professor
John Maeda
John Maeda (born 1966) is a Vice President of Design and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft. He is an American technologist and designer whose work explores where business, design, and technology merge to make space for the "humanist technolo ...
was president of
Rhode Island School of Design (RISD, 2008–2013); former professor
David Baltimore was president of
Caltech (1997–2006); and MIT alumnus and former assistant professor
Hans Mark served as chancellor of the
University of Texas system (1984–1992).
In addition, faculty members have been recruited to lead governmental agencies; for example, former professor
Marcia McNutt is president of the
National Academy of Sciences, urban studies professor
Xavier de Souza Briggs
Xavier de Souza Briggs (born 1968) is an American educator, social scientist, and policy expert, known for his work on economic opportunity, social capital, democratic governance, and leading social change. He has influenced housing and urban p ...
served as the associate director of the
White House Office of Management and Budget, and biology professor
Eric Lander
Eric Steven Lander (born February 3, 1957) is an American mathematician and geneticist who served as the 11th director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to the President, serving on the presidential Cabinet. ...
was a co-chair of the
President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. In 2013, faculty member
Ernest Moniz was nominated by President Obama and later confirmed as
United States Secretary of Energy.
Former professor Hans Mark served as Secretary of the Air Force from 1979 to 1981. Alumna and Institute Professor Sheila Widnall served as Secretary of the Air Force between 1993 and 1997, making her the first female Secretary of the Air Force and first woman to lead an entire branch of the US military in the Department of Defense.
, MIT was the second-largest employer in the city of Cambridge.
Based on feedback from employees, MIT was ranked No. 7 as a place to work, among US colleges and universities .
Surveys cited a "smart", "creative", "friendly" environment, noting that the
work-life balance tilts towards a "strong work ethic" but complaining about "low pay" compared to an industry position.
[
]
Notable alumni
Many of MIT's over 120,000 alumni have achieved considerable success in scientific research, public service, education, and
business. , 41 MIT alumni have won Nobel Prizes, 48 have been selected as
Rhodes Scholars, 61 have been selected as
Marshall Scholar
The Marshall Scholarship is a postgraduate scholarship for "intellectually distinguished young Americans ndtheir country's future leaders" to study at any university in the United Kingdom. It is widely considered one of the most prestigious ...
s,
and 3 have been selected as
Mitchell Scholars.
Alumni in United States politics and public service include former
Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, former
MA-1 Representative
John Olver, former
CA-13
California's 13th congressional district is a congressional district in the U.S. state of California. Barbara Lee, a Democrat, has represented this district since January 2013.
The 13th district no longer consists of the northwestern port ...
Representative
Pete Stark, Representative
Thomas Massie, Senator
Alex Padilla, former
National Economic Council chairman
Lawrence H. Summers
Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist who served as the 71st United States secretary of the treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He also served as pres ...
, and former
Council of Economic Advisers chairman
Christina Romer
Christina Duckworth Romer (née Duckworth; born December 25, 1958) is the Class of 1957 Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administ ...
. MIT alumni in international politics include
Foreign Affairs Minister of Iran
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs ( fa, وزارت امور خارجه, Vezārat-e Omūr-e Khārejeh) is an Iranian government ministry headed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who is a member of cabinet. The current Minister of Foreign Affairs ...
Ali Akbar Salehi,
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
President of Colombia Virgilio Barco Vargas,
President of the European Central Bank
The president of the European Central Bank is the head of the European Central Bank (ECB), the main institution responsible for the management of the euro and monetary policy in the Eurozone of the European Union (EU).
The current presiden ...
Mario Draghi, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India
Raghuram Rajan
Raghuram Govind Rajan (born 3 February 1963) is an Indian economist and the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Quote: "I am an Indian citizen. I have always ...
, former
British Foreign Minister
The secretary of state for foreign, Commonwealth and development affairs, known as the foreign secretary, is a minister of the Crown of the Government of the United Kingdom and head of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Seen as ...
David Miliband, former
Greek Prime Minister
The prime minister of the Hellenic Republic ( el, Πρωθυπουργός της Ελληνικής Δημοκρατίας, Prothypourgós tis Ellinikís Dimokratías), colloquially referred to as the prime minister of Greece ( el, Πρωθυ� ...
Lucas Papademos, former
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former
Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, former Minister of Education and Culture of The Republic of Indonesia
Yahya Muhaimin, former Jordanian Minister of Education, Higher Education and Scientific Research and former Jordanian Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources
Khaled Toukan
Khaled Toukan ( ar, خالد طوقان) is the current chairman of the Jordan Atomic Energy Commission, he served previously as the Minister of Energy for the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (2011), Minister of Education (2000-2008), and as Minist ...
. Alumni in sports have included Olympic fencing champion
Johan Harmenberg
Johan Georg Harmenberg (born 8 September 1954 in Stockholm, Sweden) is a Swedish Olympic and world champion epee fencer.
Early and personal life
Harmenberg was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He completed two years of study at the Massachusetts In ...
.
MIT alumni founded or co-founded many notable companies, such as
Intel,
McDonnell
The McDonnell Aircraft Corporation was an American aerospace manufacturer based in St. Louis, Missouri. The company was founded on July 6, 1939, by James Smith McDonnell, and was best known for its military fighters, including the F-4 Phantom II ...
Douglas
Douglas may refer to:
People
* Douglas (given name)
* Douglas (surname)
Animals
*Douglas (parrot), macaw that starred as the parrot ''Rosalinda'' in Pippi Longstocking
* Douglas the camel, a camel in the Confederate Army in the American Civil ...
,
Texas Instruments,
3Com
3Com Corporation was an American digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney and others. Bill Krause joined as President in 1981. Metcalfe e ...
,
Qualcomm,
Bose,
Raytheon,
Apotex
Apotex Inc. is a Canadian pharmaceutical corporation. Founded in 1974 by Barry Sherman, the company is the largest producer of generic drugs in Canada, with annual sales exceeding . By 2016, Apotex employed over 10,000 people as one of Canada's ...
,
Koch Industries,
Rockwell International,
Genentech,
Dropbox, and
Campbell Soup. According to the British newspaper ''
The Guardian'', "a survey of living MIT alumni found that they have formed 25,800 companies, employing more than three million people including about a quarter of the workforce of Silicon Valley. Those firms collectively generate global revenues of about $1.9 trillion (£1.2 trillion) a year". If the companies founded by MIT alumni were a country, they would have the 11th-highest GDP of any country in the world.
MIT alumni have led prominent institutions of higher education, including the
University of California system,
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...
, the
New York Institute of Technology,
Johns Hopkins University,
Carnegie Mellon University,
Tufts University,
Rochester Institute of Technology,
Rhode Island School of Design (RISD),
UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design
The College of Environmental Design, also known as the Berkeley CED, or simply CED, is one of fourteen schools and colleges at the University of California, Berkeley. The school is located in Bauer Wurster Hall on the southeast corner of the mai ...
, the
New Jersey Institute of Technology,
Northeastern University,
Tel Aviv University,
Lahore University of Management Sciences,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
Tecnológico de Monterrey
Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) ( en, Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education), also known as Tecnológico de Monterrey or just Tec, is a secular and Mixed-sex education, coeducational private ...
,
Purdue University
Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and ...
,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute,
KAIST, and
Quaid-e-Azam University.
Berklee College of Music, the largest independent college of contemporary music in the world, was founded and led by MIT alumnus
Lawrence Berk Lawrence Berk (December 10, 1908 – December 22, 1995) was the founder of Berklee College of Music, a pianist, composer and arranger, and educator.
Berk oversaw the growth of the modest Schillinger House music school into the Berklee College of Mu ...
for more than three decades.
More than one third of the
United States' crewed spaceflights have included
MIT-educated astronauts, a contribution exceeding that of any university excluding the
United States service academies. Of the
12 people who have set foot on the Moon , four graduated from MIT (among them
Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot
Buzz Aldrin). Alumnus and former faculty member
Qian Xuesen
Qian Xuesen, or Hsue-Shen Tsien (; 11 December 1911 – 31 October 2009), was a Chinese mathematician, cyberneticist, aerospace engineer, and physicist who made significant contributions to the field of aerodynamics and established engineering ...
led the
Chinese nuclear-weapons program and became instrumental in Chinese rocket-program.
Noted alumni in non-scientific fields include author
Hugh Lofting
Hugh John Lofting (14 January 1886 – 26 September 1947) was an English American writer trained as a civil engineer, who created the classic children's literature character Doctor Dolittle. The fictional physician to talking animals, based in a ...
, sculptor
Daniel Chester French, guitarist
Tom Scholz of the band
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
, the British ''
BBC'' and ''
ITN'' correspondent and political advisor
David Walter, ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist
Paul Krugman, ''
The Bell Curve'' author
Charles Murray,
United States Supreme Court building architect
Cass Gilbert,
[
]
Pritzker Prize-winning architects
I.M. Pei and
Gordon Bunshaft.
Buzz Aldrin.jpg, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, ScD 1963 (MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics)
Kofi Annan.jpg, Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, SM 1972 (MIT Sloan School of Management)
President Virgilio Barco.png, President of Colombia (1986–1990) Virgilio Barco Vargas, SB 1943 (MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering)
Ben Bernanke official portrait.jpg, Former Federal Reserve Bank chairman and 2022 Nobel Laureate Ben Bernanke, PhD 1979 (MIT Department of Economics)
Esther Duflo - Pop!Tech 2009 - 001 (cropped).jpg, Economics Nobel laureate Esther Duflo, PhD 1999 (MIT Department of Economics), also an MIT professor
Richard Feynman Nobel.jpg, Physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, SB 1939 (MIT Department of Physics)
Edward Michael Fincke.jpg, Astronaut and USAF Colonel Michael Fincke, SB 1989 (MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics), SB 1989 (MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences)
Daniel Chester French 1902 crop.jpg, Sculptor Daniel Chester French, Did not graduate
Paul Krugman-press conference Dec 07th, 2008-8.jpg, Economics Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, PhD 1977 (MIT Department of Economics)
Ronald mcnair.jpg, Space Shuttle ''Challenger'' astronaut and physicist Ronald McNair, PhD 1976 (MIT Department of Physics)
Benjamin Netanyahu.jpg, Israeli Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, SB 1975 (MIT Architecture), SM 1976 (MIT Sloan School of Management)
I.M. Pei.JPG, Architect I. M. Pei, BArch 1940 (MIT Architecture)
ClaudeShannon MFO3807.jpg, Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as a "father of information theory".
As a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts I ...
, PhD 1940 (MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)
Alfred P. Sloan on the cover of TIME Magazine, December 27, 1926.jpg, CEO of General Motors Alfred P. Sloan
Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr. ( ; May 23, 1875February 17, 1966) was an American business executive in the automotive industry. He was a long-time president, chairman and CEO of General Motors Corporation. Sloan, first as a senior executive and l ...
, SB 1895 (MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)
TomScholz.JPG, "Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
" guitarist Tom Scholz, SB 1969, SM 1970 (MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering)
Michael Massimino.jpg, Astronaut and engineer Mike Massimino
Michael James Massimino (born August 19, 1962) is an American professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University and a former NASA astronaut. He is the senior advisor of space programs at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.
Early ...
, PhD 1992 (MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering)
Robert Woodward Nobel.jpg, Chemist and Nobel laureate Robert Burns Woodward, SB 1936, PhD 1937
See also
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Engineering
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Whitehead Institute
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is a non-profit research institute located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States that is dedicated to improving human health through basic biomedical research. It was founded as a fiscally indepe ...
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Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
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Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research
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The Coop, campus bookstore
Notes
References
Sources
: ''Also see th
bibliographymaintained by MIT'
Institute Archives & Special Collectionsand Written Works in MIT in popular culture.''
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*Nelkin, Dorothy. (1972). ''The University and Military Research: Moral politics at MIT (science, technology and society)''. New York: Cornell University Press. .
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Postle, Denis. (1965). ''How to be First''. BBC documentary on MIT available at reidplaza.com*Renehan, Colm. (2007)
''Peace Activism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1975 to 2001: A case study'' PhD thesis, Boston: Boston College.
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External links
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{{Good article
Universities and colleges in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Universities and colleges in Middlesex County, Massachusetts
Engineering universities and colleges in Massachusetts
Technological universities in the United States
Land-grant universities and colleges
Educational institutions established in 1861
1861 establishments in Massachusetts
Rugby league stadiums in the United States
Science and technology in Massachusetts
Private universities and colleges in Massachusetts
Glassmaking schools
Compasso d'Oro Award recipients