This is a list of famous individuals associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including graduates, former students, and professors. See also: people at the Mathematics Department.

Prominent faculty members

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A few distinguished members of the faculty have held the title of Institute Professor. These include:

• Manson Benedict, nuclear engineering^*
• Emilio Bizzi, brain and cognitive sciences^*
• Noam Chomsky, most cited person in the world still living; inventor of the most common linguistics framework used today; inventor of the theory that enabled modern computer languages.
• Morris Cohen, materials science and engineering
• John M. Deutch, chemistry, former director of the CIA
• Peter Diamond, economics^*
• Mildred Dresselhaus, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and physics
• Jerome Friedman, physics
• Morris Halle, linguistics and philosophy
• John Harbison, music
• Arthur von Hippel, EECS^*
• Chia-Chiao Lin, mathematics^*
• John Little, management
• Francis Low, physics^*
• Thomas Magnanti, EECS and management^* (Listed as "Dean/Faculty")
• Philip Morrison, physics
• Joel Moses, EECS
• Paul Samuelson, Nobel prize-winner, economics
• Ascher Shapiro, mechanical engineering (d. Nov. 26, 2004)^*
• Phillip Sharp, biology^*, co-founder of Biogen, 1993 Nobel Laureate in Medicine
• Isadore Singer, mathematics
• Robert Solow, Nobel prize-winner, economics
• Daniel Wang, chemical engineering^*
• John Waugh, chemistry^* (listed as "Professor Emeritus")
• Sheila E. Widnall, aerospace, Secretary of the Air Force
• Jerome Wiesner

Other prominent current and former faculty and researchers include:

• Hal Abelson — computer scientist
• Leo Beranek - cofounder of the pioneering telecommunications and Internet company Bolt, Beranek and Newman
• Tim Berners-Lee — inventor of the World Wide Web
• George Boolos — philosopher and mathematical logician
• Richard Bolt - cofounder of the pioneering telecommunications and Internet company Bolt, Beranek and Newman
• Amar G. Bose Ph.D. — audio entrepreneur, founder of Bose Corporation
• Rodney Brooks — behavioural roboticist
• James D. Bruce — Vice President for Information Systems, Professor of Electrical Engineering
• Vannevar Bush — scientist & engineer, bureaucrat
• B.D. Colen — journalist, photographer
• John M. Deutch — former CIA director
• John W. Dower — Historian of Japan, winner of a Pulitzer Prize
• Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton — former MIT EECS professor, co-founder and is the "E" of the defense contractor giant EG&G, photography pioneer.
• Kerry Emanuel — hurricanes
• Robert Engle — Nobel prize-winner, economics, former MIT Prof of Economics
• Jay W. Forrester — System Dynamics
• John R. Hauser, management
• Jim Hines — System Dynamics
• Henry W. Kendall — Nobel prize-winner, physicist
• Wolfgang Ketterle — Nobel prize-winner, physicist
• Eric Lander — geneticist, a principal leader of the Human Genome Project
• Walter Lewin — physicist
• J. C. R. Licklider — leader of the IPTO
• Alan Lightman — writer, physicist
• Andrew B. Lippman — Media Lab pioneer
• Robert Langer, Chemical Engineering
• Edward Lorenz, developed the Butterfly Effect theory
• John Maeda — artist, graphic designer, computer scientist
• Allan McCollum — contemporary artist
• William J. Mitchell — architect, writer, media guru
• Marvin Minsky — artificial intelligence guru
• Franco Modigliani — Nobel prize-winner, economist
• Mario Molina — Nobel prize-winner, chemistry, Earth, Atmosphere, and Planetary Sciences
• John Nash — Nobel prize-winner, mathematician
• Nicholas Negroponte — OLPC project leader
• Seymour Papert — education & computers
• Alex (Sandy) Pentland — human-computer interaction and social networks
• Steven Pinker — cognitive scientist
• Theodore Postol - nuclear weapons expert and prominent critic of current ballistic missile defense systems
• Nelson Repenning — System Dynamics
• Ellen Swallow Richards — the first woman in America accepted to any school of science and technology, first female instructor at MIT, first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry, foremost female industrial and environmental chemist in the United States in the 1800s
• Ron Rivest — cryptographer, co-inventor of RSA, inventor of RC5, MD5 and several other cryptographic algorithms -- the most commonly used encryption technologies used today.
• Gian-Carlo Rota — mathematician & philosopher
• Frederick P. Salvucci — civil engineer, former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation, and principal planner of the Big Dig
• Edgar Schein — organizational psychologist
• Richard Schrock — Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2005
• Myron S. Scholes — Nobel prize-winner, economist
• Peter Senge — Learning Organizations
• Claude E. Shannon M.S., Ph.D. - inventor of information theory
• George P. Shultz — United States Secretary of Labor, Treasury, and State. Former Professor at both the MIT Department of Economics and the Sloan School. Earned a PhD in Economics from MIT in 1949.
• Isadore Singer — mathematician, Institute Professor, joint winner of the 2004 Abel Prize
• Richard Stallman — hacker, political campaigner, founder of the GNU Project and the FSF, author of GNU Emacs and recipient of a McArthur Foundation fellowship.
• Robert Stalnaker, philosopher, linguist
• John Sterman — System Dynamics
• Dirk Jan Struik — mathematician and historian of mathematics
• Gerald Sussman — co-inventor of Scheme, research in artificial intelligence, computer languages, and orbital mechanics
• Ivan Sutherland — computer graphics pioneer
• Susumu Tonegawa — molecular biologist, 1987 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine
• Sherry Turkle — clinical psychologist and sociologist
• Eric von Hippel — economist and behavioral theorist
• Joseph Weizenbaum — computer scientist
• Norbert Wiener — mathematician
• Frank Wilczek, physicist, Nobel prize in Physics

Notable alumni

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See also: MIT Sloan School of Management Alumni. Names present there should also be included on this list.

• Tadatoshi Akiba — Mayor of Hiroshima, Ph.D. (math) 1970
• Joseph Alsop - cofounder of Progress Software, the largest software company based in Massachusetts
• Virgilio Barco - former Colombian president
• Steve Altes — humorist, National Medal of Technology recipient
• Kofi Annan — Secretary-General of the United Nations
• Pedro Aspe Armella — Mexican Secretary of Finance, Ph.D. (Economics) 1978
• Les Aspin— US Congressman from Wisconsin, Clinton's first Secretary of Defense, Ph.D. (Economics) 1966
• Ben Bernanke - current Chair of the Federal Reserve, Ph.D. (Economics) 1979
• Richard Barry - cofounder of Sycamore Networks
• Gordon Bell - computer engineer and manager, designer of the DEC PDP and manager of the VAX project.
• Harry Binswanger — philosopher, associate of Ayn Rand
• Barry Blesser — audio engineer, one-time president of the AES
• Manuel Blum, computer scientist, recipient of the Turing Award in 1995 for his studies in computational complexity theory
• Samuel Bodman - current Secretary of Energy (2005-present)
• Dan Bricklin — co-inventor of Visicalc, the first WYSIWYG PC spreadsheet program
• Idit Harel Capelton - educational psychologist and epistomologist
• Richard Carrion — Chief Executive Officer of Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, and of Popular, Inc.
• Ahmed Chalabi — controversial Iraqi politician, now currently deputy prime minister of Iraq
• Morris Chang - Chairman of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) , the largest semiconductor foundry in the world
• Jun Choi — Mayor of Edison, New Jersey
• Joseph Chung - cofounded Art Technology Group with fellow MIT grad Jeet Singh
• Wen Tsing Chow — missile guidance scientist and digital computer pioneer
• David D. Clark - led the development of TCP/IP -- the protocol that underlies the Internet
• Wesley A. Clark - computing pioneer, creator of the LINC (the first minicomputer)
• Ogden Codman, Jr. — architect and interior designer
• Jared Cohon — president of Carnegie Mellon
• Fernando Corbato - Professor at MIT, Turing Award winner of 1990, co-founder of the Multics project
• Csaba Csere — automotive journalist, editor of Car and Driver
• Peter Denning -Computer scientists, co-founder of the Multics project
• Jack Dennis - Professor at MIT until 1987, co-founder of the Multics project.
• Nick DeWolf - co-founder of Teradyne with Alex d'Arbeloff
• Whitfield Diffie — pioneer of public-key cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman protocol.
• Jimmy Doolittle — Aeronautical engineer and U.S. Air Force general
• Donald Douglas — co-founder of McDonnell Douglas
• John Dorrance - founder of the Campbell Soup Company
• K. Eric Drexler — nanotechnologist
• Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton — former MIT EECS professor, co-founder and is the "E" of the defense contractor giant EG&G, photography pioneer.
• Farouk El-Baz — Supervisor of Lunar Science Planning, Apollo Program, NASA
• Luis A. Ferré — governor of Puerto Rico
• José Figueres Ferrer — president of Costa Rica
• Carl Feynman — son of the physicist Richard Feynman
• Richard Feynman — Nobel-prize winning physicist
• Carly Fiorina — Former CEO of Hewlett-Packard
• Shantanurao Laxmanrao Kirloskar — founder of Kirloskar Group
• William Clay Ford, Jr. — Chairman and CEO of Ford Motor Company
• Victor Kwok-king Fung — prominent Hong Kong billionaire businessman and political figure
• Eugenio Garza Sada - Mexican businessman, philantropist and founder of the Tec de Monterrey (ITESM).
• Arthur Gelb - co-founder, former CEO and former Chair or TASC
• Kenneth Germeshausen - co-founder and the 1st 'G' of the defense contractor EG&G, which is now part of the URS Corporation
• Jim Gettys — one of the original developers of XWindows, former director of GNOME.
• Bill Gosper — one of the founders of the original hacker community, originator of hashlife
• Mark Gorenberg - partner of the venture capital firm Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
• Cecil H. Green - co-founder of Texas Instruments
• Herbert Grier- co-founder and the 2nd 'G' of the defense contractor EG&G, which is now part of the URS Corporation
• George Ellery Hale - astronomer
• George Hatsopoulos - founder of Thermo Electron Corporation
• Nathanael Herreshoff — naval architect-engineer, yacht designer
• William R. Hewlett — (Master's degree) co-founder of Hewlett-Packard
• Danny Hillis — co-founder of Thinking Machines and former Disney fellow
• Mark Horowitz, B.S. and M.S. 1978— founder of Rambus
• C.D. Howe - Canadian politician and cabinet minister
• David A. Huffman — computer scientist known for Huffman coding used in lossless data compression
• Jerome C. Hunsaker - pioneering aeronautical engineer
• Shirley Jackson (physicist) - prominent African-American physicist and president of RPI
• Irwin M. Jacobs - co-founder of Qualcomm with Andrew Viterbi, current chairman and former CEO. Former MIT professor (1959-1966)
• William Jeffrey - 13th Director, National Institute of Standards and Technology
• Martin C. Jischke — President of Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
• Larry Kahn — tiddlywinks champion
• Brewster Kahle — internet archivist
• Mitch Kapor — software entrepreneur, founder of Lotus Corporation
• Steve Kirsch — inventor of the optical mouse, co-founder of Frame Technology Corporation (the original company behind FrameMaker), founder of Infoseek Corporation
• Leonard Kleinrock - computing and Internet pioneer, one of the key group of designers of the original ARPANET
• Charles Koch - Co-owner, Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, the largest private company in the US
• David H. Koch - Co-Owner (with brother Charles Koch of Koch Industries. Vice-Presidential Candidate for the Libertarian Party.
• Pentti Kouri — economist and investor
• Paul Krugman — New York Times columnist, John Bates Clark Medal-winner, PhD (economics)
• Raymond Kurzweil — inventor and entrepreneur in synthesized-music keyboards, OCR and speech-to-text processing
• Leslie Lamport - Computing pioneer on temporal logic, developer of LaTeX
• Jay Last - One of the "Traitorous Eight" that founded Fairchild Semiconductor. Co-founder of Amelco, which became Teledyne
• Daniel Lewin — founder of Akamai
• Arthur D. Little — entrepreneur, founder of the eponymous management consulting firm in 1886
• Jack Little — entrepreneur, co-founder of The MathWorks, which created and sells MATLAB
• Hugh Lofting — author of "Dr. Doolittle" (trained at MIT as civil engineer, 1904-05)
• Edward Lovett — Architect
• Ray Magliozzi — radio personality (Car Talk)
• Tom Magliozzi — radio personality (Car Talk)
• N. Gregory Mankiw — Chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors PhD (Economics)
• Hiram Percy Maxim — Inventor of the "Maxim Silencer" and founder of the American Radio Relay League
• Mark McClellan - head of Medicare and Medicaid, former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
• Katharine Dexter McCormick — biologist, suffragette, funded research for The Pill
• James McDonnell — co-founder of McDonnell Douglas
• Patrick McGovern — founder of IDG/Computerworld
• David McGrath - founder of TAD resources, employing over 30k people, ^*, now part of the human resources giant Adecco
• Douglas McIllroy - mathematician and engineer, an original developer of UNIX, member of the National Academy of Engineering
• Dana Mead - former CEO and Chair of Tenneco
• Steve Meretzky - computer game designer
• Robert Metcalfe — entrepreneur, founder of 3Com; inventor of Ethernet
• David Miliband — British politician, cabinet minister for Communities and Local Government
• Charles Murray — researcher and co-author of The Bell Curve
• Mohammad Ali Najafi — former Vice President of Iran^*
• Stewart Nelson - founder of System Concepts
• Benjamin Netanyahu — former Prime Minister of Israel
• William Emery Nickerson - founder of Gillette, now part of Procter & Gamble
• David Nolan — Founder of United States Libertarian Party
• Robert Noyce — integrated circuit pioneer, co-founder of Intel
• Piermaria Oddone - director of Fermilab
• Ken Olsen — founder of Digital Equipment Corporation
• Neil Pappalardo - founder of Medical Information Technology Inc. (Meditech)
• I. M. Pei — architect
• Alan Perlis - Computer scientist, winner of the first Turing Award in 1966.
• Radia Perlman - Computer Scientist, inventor of numerous data networking technologies, dubbed 'Mother of the Internet'
• Tom Perkins — founder of VC firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers
• William Poduska - Computer engineer and entrepreneur, founder of Prime Computer and Apollo Computers
• Generoso Pope - business magnate, founder/owner of The National Inquirer
• Princess Ubol Ratana - of Thailand
• William Porter — Founder of E*TRADE
• Allen Razdow — founder of Mathsoft Inc. & inventor of Mathcad
• John S. Reed — Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange
• Larry Roberts - Internet pioneer and businessman, one of the key group of designers of the original ARPANET, cofounder of Caspian Networks and Packetcom, former CEO of DHL
• Sheldon Roberts - one of the "Traitorous Eight" that founded Fairchild Semiconductor. Co-founder of Amelco which later became Teledyne.
• Willard Rockwell — founder of Rockwell International
• Steve Russell — creator of the first videogame Spacewar!
• Jeff Sagarin — sports statistician
• Jerome Saltzer - MIT EECS professor (1966-1995) and computing pioneer, co-founder of the Multics project, Director of Project Athena
• Arthur Samberg - Chairman of Pequot Capital Management
• George W. Santos — Pioneer in bone marrow transplantation
• Michael J. Saylor - Founder of MicroStrategy
• Tom Scholz — founder of the rock group Boston and Scholz Research & Development, Inc., manufacturers of Rockman sound equipment
• Bob Scheifler - computer scientist, leader of the X Window System project, architect of Jini
• Ed Seykota - Pioneering Commodity Trader
• Jim Simons - mathematician and philanthropist. Founder of Renaissance Technologies, one of the world's most successful hedge funds.
• Henry Singleton - founder of Teledyne
• Jeet Singh - cofounded Art Technology Group with fellow MIT grad Joseph Chung
• Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. — automobile entrepreneur, CEO of General Motors
• Ellen Spertus - Named "Sexiest Geek Alive"
• Ray Stata — founder of Analog Devices
• Louis Sullivan — architect
• Lawrence H. Summers — economist, president of Harvard University
• John E. Sununu — United States Senator from New Hampshire
• John H. Sununu - Chief of Staff under President George H.W. Bush, 3-term Governor of New Hampshire, host of Crossfire
• Ivan Sutherland - computing and Internet pioneer, one of the key group of original designers of the original ARPANET, Turing Award winner of 1988.
• Eric Swanson - Cofounder of Sycamore Networks
• Robert A. Swanson — cofounder of Genentech
• Andrew Tanenbaum — computer scientist and creator of Minix, the precursor to Linux
• John Thain — Chief executive officer of the New York Stock Exchange
• Laura D'Andrea Tyson - Chairman of the CEA under Clinton. Former dean of the Haas School of Business. Current Dean of the London Business School
• Erland Van Lidth De Jeude — Hollywood actor and opera singer
• Hal Varian - economist, founding dean of the School of Information at UC Berkeley
• Milen Veltchev — Bulgarian financial minister (2001-2005)
• Andrew Viterbi — inventor of the Viterbi algorithm and cofounder of Qualcomm
• Philippe Villers - founder of Computervision, which is now part of Parametric Technology Corporation
• Harry Mohr Weese - architect & historic preservation advocate
• Martin Weinstein - founder of Tyco International
• Dr. F. Helmut Weymar - Founder of Commodities Corporation
• Uncas Whitaker - founder of AMP Incorporated, employing over 28000 people ^*, now a division of Tyco International
• Ron Williams, CEO of Aetna, beginning in January, 2006
• Robert Winters - Canadian politician
• James Woods — actor (dropped out)
• Stefano Young — Bass player for House of Kabob
• Edward Yourdon- computer pioneer, popularized the term Y2K Bug
• Pavel Krapivin - Cofounder of Doostang.com
• Rigoberto Omar Romero Martínez - former Honduras Subsecretary of Planning (1984) and Subscretary of Trasportation and Public Works (1985).

Alumni Nobel laureates

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• George Akerlof, Ph.D. 1966 — Nobel laureate (economics, 2001)
• Robert Aumann, S.M. 1952, Ph.D. 1955 — Nobel laureate (economics, 2005)
• Sid Altman, S.B. 1960 — Nobel laureate (Chemistry, 1989)
• Kofi Annan, S.M. 1972 — United Nations Secretary-General, Nobel laureate (Peace, 2001)
• Elias James Corey Jr., S.B. 1948, Ph.D. 1951 — Nobel laureate (Chemistry, 1990)
• Eric Cornell, Ph.D. 1990 — Nobel laureate (Physics, 2001)
• Richard Feynman, S.B. 1939 — Nobel laureate (Physics, 1965)
• Leland H. Hartwell, Ph.D. 1964 — Nobel laureate (Medicine/Physiology, 2001)
• H. Robert Horvitz, S.B. 1968 — Nobel laureate (Physiology/Medicine, 2002)
• Henry W. Kendall, S.B. 1948, Ph.D. 1951 — Nobel laureate (Physics, 1990)
• Lawrence Klein, Ph.D. 1944 — Nobel laureate (Economics, 1980)
• Robert B. Laughlin, Ph.D. 1979 — Nobel laureate (Physics, 1998)
• Murray Gell-Mann, Ph.D. 1951 — physicist, Nobel laureate (Physics, 1969)
• Robert C. Merton, Ph.D. 1970 — Nobel laureate (Economics, 1997)
• Robert S. Mulliken, S.B. 1917 — Nobel laureate (Chemistry, 1966)
• Robert Mundell, Ph.D. 1956 — Nobel laureate (Economics, 1999)
• Charles Pedersen, S.M. 1927 — Nobel laureate (Chemistry, 1987)
• William D. Phillips, Ph.D. 1976, Nobel laureate (Physics 1997)
• Burton Richter, S.B. 1952, Ph.D. 1956 - Nobel laureate (1976, physics)
• John Robert Schrieffer, S.B. 1953 — Nobel laureate (Physics, 1972)
• William Shockley, Ph.D. 1936 — Nobel laureate (Physics, 1956)
• Joseph Stiglitz, Ph.D. 1966 — Nobel laureate (Economics, 2001)
• Carl E. Wieman, S.B. 1973 — Nobel laureate (Physics, 2001)
• Robert Burns Woodward, S.B. 1936 — Nobel laureate (Chemistry, 1965)

Alumni astronauts

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• Buzz Aldrin, Sc.D. 1963
• Dominic Antonelli, BS 1989
• Jerome Apt, Ph.D. 1976
• Kenneth Cameron, S.B. 1978, MS 1979
• Gregory Chamitoff, Ph.D. 1992
• Franklin Chang-Diaz, Sc.D. 1977
• Phillip Chapman, S.M. 1964, Ph.D. 1967
• Catherine Coleman, S.B. 1983
• Timothy Creamer, S.M. 1992
• Charles Duke, S.M. 1964
• Anthony England, S.B. 1965, S.M. 1965, Ph.D. 1970
• Edward Fincke, dual S.B. 1989
• John Grunsfeld, S.B. 1980
• Terry Hart, S.M. 1969
• Frederick Hauck, S.M. 1966
• Wendy Lawrence, S.M. 1988
• Mark Lee, S.M. 1980
• William B. Lenoir, S.B. 1961, S.M. 1962, Ph.D. 1965
• Michael Massimino, dual S.M. 88, Mechanical Engineer 1990, Ph.D. 1992
• Ronald McNair, Ph.D. 1976, killed in the Space Shuttle Challenger mission STS-51-L in 1986
• Pamela Ann Melroy, S.M. 1984
• Edgar Mitchell, Sc.D. 1964
• Nicholas Patrick, S.M. 1990, Ph.D. 1996
• Russell Schweickart, S.B. 1956, S.M. 1963
• David Scott, S.M., E.A.A. (Engineer in Aeronautics/Astronautics degree) 1962
• William Shepherd, S.M. 1978, Ocean Engineer 1978
• Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, S.B. 1984, S.M. 1985
• Daniel Tani, S.B. 1984, S.M. 1985
• Robert Thirsk, S.M. 1978, M.B.A. 1998
• Janice Voss, S.M. 1977, Ph.D. 1978
• Neil Woodward, S.B. 1984

Fictional characters

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• Jack Florey
• Stanley Brack
• Gordon Freeman — fictional physicist of Half-Life
• David Levinson, Independence Day - Manager at NYC cable station, degree in computer science.
• The man who ran the computer in the Brothers Four song, John Henry, The Thinkin' Man ^*
• Will Hunting, Good Will Hunting - Savant on-campus janitor
• James Clayton, The Recruit - NSA trainee, degree in "non-linear cryptography"
• Ben Chapleski, Orgazmo
• Rockhound, Armageddon - Geologist with two MIT doctorates in Chemistry and Geology
• Ellie Arroway, Contact - SETI researcher
• Benjamin Gates, National Treasure (2004)
• Otacon, Metal Gear Solid -
• Mike Cannon- Las Vegas
• Darcy - Secretary in The Loop
• Richard Sumner, Desk Set - A "PhD from MIT in Science"

Lists of people by university in the United States | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni