Curated playlist
Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
- Jon KleinbergJon Kleinberg grew up in a household where mathematics and computing were simply the texture of daily life. His father Eugene was a mathematics professor at SUNY Buffalo. His mother Evelyn was a computer science researcher. Even his…
- George AkerlofGeorge Akerlof walked into a used car lot and saw the entire economy differently. The year was 1970, and the article he published that year, "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism," asked a deceptively simple…
- Nathan RosenNathan Rosen published a paper on the structure of the atomic nucleus in Physical Review in 1931. James Chadwick wouldn't formally discover the neutron until the following year. That gap is a signature of how Rosen worked. He was…
- Esther DufloEsther Duflo was born on the 25th of October 1972 in Paris, and by the age of 46 she had become the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. She shared that prize in 2019 with her husband Abhijit Banerjee…
- Arthur Samuel (computer scientist)Arthur Lee Samuel coined the term "machine learning" in 1959, and the computers of his era had almost no memory to spare. Working at IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York, Samuel faced a problem that would define the rest of the century: how do…
- Daniel HuttenlocherDaniel Huttenlocher holds 24 patents in computer vision, a total reached by 2015 after decades of research. Yet his most widely read work carries two other names alongside his own. One is Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State. The…
- Carl WiemanCarl Wieman grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, in a family with an unusual range of intellectual passions. His paternal grandfather, Henry Nelson Wieman, was a religious philosopher of German descent. His mother came from a white Anglo-Saxon…
- Eric Allin CornellEric Allin Cornell was born on the 19th of December, 1961, in Palo Alto, California, to parents who were finishing graduate degrees at Stanford University. Within two years, the family had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his…
- Sam Bankman-FriedSam Bankman-Fried was playing League of Legends on a call with Sequoia Capital investors. He was pitching FTX as a future "super app." The investors described it as one of those "your-hair-is-blown-back type of meetings." Sequoia…
- Claude ShannonClaude Elwood Shannon was born on the 30th of April 1916, in a hospital in Petoskey, Michigan, and by the time he died on the 24th of February 2001, he had done something almost no individual in history can claim: he invented an entirely…
- Terry WinogradTerry Allen Winograd was born on the 24th of February 1946, and he would go on to become one of computing's most quietly influential figures. He is a professor at Stanford University, co-director of the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction…
- Walter PittsWalter Pitts was born in Detroit, Michigan, on the 23rd of April 1923, and he died at age 46, leaving behind a body of work that still defines how scientists think about the brain as a computing device. He never earned a doctorate. He…
- Gilbert N. LewisGilbert Newton Lewis was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 41 times, and he never won it once. On the 23rd of March 1946, a graduate student found his lifeless body under a laboratory workbench at the University of California,…
- Andrew NgAndrew Yan-Tak Ng was born in London on the 18th of April 1976, to a hematologist father and an arts administrator mother who had both immigrated from Hong Kong. Before he was a teenager, his family had already moved twice: first back to…
- Robert J. ShillerRobert James Shiller was born on the 29th of March, 1946, in Detroit, Michigan, and he would grow up to be one of the few economists who actually warned the world about a financial catastrophe before it happened. Twice. Most economists are…