Why MIT is Special ?
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Institute is a land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant university, with an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River. The Institute also 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 Institutes.
Founded in 1861 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. It has since played a key role in the development of many aspects of modern science, engineering, mathematics, and technology, and is widely known for its innovation and academic strength, making it one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world.
As of October 2019, 96 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award 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,[15] 73 Marshall Scholars,[16] 48 Rhodes Scholars, 41 astronauts,[18] and 16 Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force have been affiliated with MIT. The school also has a strong entrepreneurial culture.
MIT is a member of theAssociation of American Universities.
Tech at MIT
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The MIT community is driven by a shared purpose:
to make a better world througheducation,research, and innovation.
We are fun and quirky, elite but not elitist, inventive and artistic, obsessed with numbers, and welcoming to talented people regardless of where they come from.
Motto
Founded to accelerate the nation’s industrial revolution, MIT is profoundly American. With ingenuity and drive, our graduates have invented fundamental technologies, launched new industries, and created millions of American jobs. At the same time, and without the slightest sense of contradiction, MIT is profoundly global (opens in new window). Our community gains tremendous strength as a magnet for talent from around the world. Through teaching, research, and innovation, MIT’s exceptional community pursues its mission of service to the nation and the world.
MIT’s motto is “mens et manus,” or “mind and hand,” signifying the fusion of academic knowledge with practical purpose.
1. Key Facts
History
Incorporated 1861
Motto“Mens et manus” (“Mind and hand”)
Campus
LocationCambridge, MA USA
Size 166 acres (0.67 km2)
Student residences - 18
Playing fields 26 acres (0.11 km2)
Gardens + green spaces - 30+
Publicly sited works of art- 60+
Admissions (Class of 2023)
Applicants - 21,312
Admits - 1,427
Selected Honors
Nobel laureates - 95
National Medal of Science Winners -59
National Medal of Technology and Innovation winners -29
MacArthur Fellows-77
A. M. Turing Award winners-15
Pic : Original Rogers Building,Back Bay, Boston, 19th century
II. Mission
The mission of MIT is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.
The Institute is committed to generating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge, and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges. MIT is dedicated to providing its students with an education that combines rigorous academic study and the excitement of discovery with the support and intellectual stimulation of a diverse campus community. We seek to develop in each member of the MIT community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.
Pic : Stereographic cardshowing an MIT mechanical drafting studio, 19th century (photo byE.L. Allen, left/right inverted)
Pic : Product Integraph Lab , 1927
III. MIT's contributions to technology
1. World Wide Web Consortium
The first sentence on the first World Wide Web site had to explain to visitors what exactly this thing was. Tim Berners-Lee, the soft-spoken Briton who invented the Web in 1989 while working at a particle physics lab in Geneva, came to MIT in 1994 to help create the World Wide Web Consortium, to help spread technical standards for building websites, browsers, and devices (like televisions) that offer access to Web content.
His greatest act of all was actually something he didn’t do: patent his invention or extract licensing fees from those who used his ideas – decisions that helped the Web go global in a few years.
“The thing spread largely because I didn’t make World Wide Web Incorporated in 1991,” Berners-Lee has said.
When Queen Elizabeth II knighted Berners-Lee, he said it showed that great things could happen to ordinary people who took on projects that “happen to work out.”
2. Transistor Radio
Considered by some to be the most important invention of the 20th century, the solid-state transistor was born at Bell Labs in New Jersey. One of the three Nobel Prize laureate inventors was William Shockley, who earned his doctorate at MIT in 1936. Among the first products to take advantage of transistors were hearing aids, portable radios, and televisions.
3.Send. Reply. Delete.
In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, an MIT alum working at Bolt Beranek and Newman, a Cambridge consulting firm founded by other MIT alums, sent the first e-mail between two computers on the Arpanet (the Internet’s predecessor). He picked the @ to separate the user’s name from the computer “host” where he could be reached. When Tomlinson showed his e-mail system to another BBN employee, he reportedly said: “Don’t tell anyone! This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working on.”
4. The Minicomputer
Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, who worked at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in the 1950s, formed a start-up called Digital Equipment Corp. in 1957 to build what they called “interactive minicomputers,” which would be smaller and less expensive than mainframes and designed with business use in mind. Digital’s first minicomputer, the PDP-1, sold for $120,000 and came standard with 9K of internal memory.
Digital became the second-biggest tech company in the world at one point, after IBM Corp.
5. The New Robots
When they started iRobot Corp. in 1990, MIT grads Helen Greiner and Colin Angle knew they wanted to build robots; they’d figure out their business model later. Did they ever. The Roomba vacuum arrived in 2002, the first truly functional robot to find its way into American households. Last year it earned iRobot more than $400 million in revenue. On a more serious note, iRobot developed a reconnaissance robot for the military. PackBot acts as eyes and ears for troops and neutralizes roadside bombs, screens vehicles and people for devices, and goes into caves. iRobot has built about 3,500 PackBots for US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
6. Bose
MIT electrical engineering professor Amar Bose had a simple mission in 1964: design a stereo speaker that could come closer to reproducing the sound of a live musical performance. His company led the rush to create dozens of game-changing products, from noise-canceling headphones to a better bedside alarm clock. Its newest product is a flat-panel TV that eliminates the need for external speakers.
Bose donated most of his stock to MIT last month making MIT the company’s majority owner.
Bose has more than $1.8 billion in annual revenues and about 8,000 employees.
7. Key to the Kindle
Love your Kindle? Thank MIT. Media Lab associate professor Joseph Jacobson is a cofounder of E Ink Corp., the company that produces the highly readable black-and-white screens found on many electronic books, including Amazon.com, popular eBook reader. Now owned by a Taiwanese technology firm, E Ink is making life miserable for the printed word, while preserving the written word in the digital age.
8. The spreadsheet
Dan Bricklin was sitting in a classroom at Harvard Business School when he had this idea to create an “electronic spreadsheet” or “Calcu-ledger” – a way for managers to do complex accounting using a computer or project how their revenues might grow under different scenarios. Bricklin, a 1973 MIT graduate, and fellow MIT alum Bob Frankston rented time late at night on an MIT mainframe computer (it cost $1 an hour to use) to write the program that would become VisiCalc. It led to programs like Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel.
9. Birth of the iPod... and more
As an MIT doctoral student in the early 1950s, Robert Noyce was known as “Rapid Robert” for his quick mind. As a cofounder ofIntel Corp., he was known as the “Mayor of Silicon Valley.” A mentor to Apple’s Steve Jobs, Noyce is one of those credited as the inventor of the first practical integrated circuit, a.k.a. the “microchip” – which made modern-day computers possible. Without that, no iPod.
10. HP
William Reddington Hewlett, the cofounder of Hewlett-PackardDevelopment Co., earned his master’s in engineering from MIT in 1936.
This List is almost endless...will continue to come forever from MIT.
IV. Humanities
MIT established its School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) in 1950, with the Economics Department playing a central role within the School. The Economics Department expanded significantly in the years following World War II with entrepreneurial leadership from Rupert MacLaurin and a supportive university administration. By the 1950s, it was established as one of the world’s leading centers for economic research. Graduates of the MIT Economics Department’s doctoral program are now well-represented on the faculties of virtually all leading economics departments. The MIT Economics Department today is a vibrant collection of faculty and students. The Department’s faculty have received numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize. Many are Fellows of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Econometric Society. Numerous faculty members have served in various elected offices of the American Economic Association and the Econometric Society.
V. Globally Recognised people associated with MIT
1.Kofi Annan
Kofi Annan was the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1997 to 2006, and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2001 along with the UN for “their work for a better organized and more peaceful world”. He also established the Kofi Annan Foundation, an independent, not-for profit organization which works to promote better international governance and support the abilities of people and countries to achieve a fairer, more peaceful world. Following his death on August 18 2018, current UN Secretary-General António Guterres called Kofi Annan "A champion for peace and a guiding force for good."
2. Paul A Samuelson
Paul Anthony Samuelson was an American economist. The first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, the Swedish Royal Academies stated, when awarding the prize in 1970, that he "has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory". Economic historian Randall E. Parker has called him the "Father of Modern Economics", and The New York Times considered him to be the "foremost academic economist of the 20th century".
He entered the University of Chicagoat age 16, during the depths of theGreat Depression, and received his PhD in economics from Harvard. After graduating, he became an assistant professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when he was 25 years of age and a full professor at age 32. In 1966, he was named Institute Professor, MIT's highest faculty honor. He spent his career at MIT, where he was instrumental in turning its Department of Economics into a world-renowned institution by attracting other noted economists to join the faculty, including Robert M. Solow,Franco Modigliani,Robert C. Merton,Joseph E. Stiglitz, and Paul Krugman, all of whom went on to win Nobel Prizes.
3. Abhijit Banerjee
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003 he co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of the Lab’s Directors.
Abhijit is the author of a large number of articles and four books, including Poor Economics, which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year, and Good Economics for Hard Times, both co-authored with Esther Duflo. He is the editor of three more books and has directed two documentary films. Banerjee has on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. He is a co-recipient of the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his groundbreaking work in development economics research.
4. Esther Duflo,
Esher Duflo, FBA is a French–American economist who is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, which was established in 2003. She shared the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, "for their experimental approach toalleviating global poverty".
5. Raghuram Govindarajan
Raghuram Govindarajan is an Indian economist and the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of ChicagoBooth School of Business. Between 2003 and 2006 he was Chief Economist and Director of Research at theInternational Monetary Fund. From September 2013 through September 2016 he was the 23rd Governorof the Reserve Bank of India ; in 2015, during his tenure at the Indian Reserve Bank he became the Vice-Chairman of the Bank for International Settlements.
In 1991, he received a Ph.D from MIT Sloan School of Management for his thesis titled Essays on Banking under the supervision of Stewart Myers , consisting of three essays on the nature of the relationship between a firm or a country, and its creditor banks.
At the Federal Reserve annual Jackson Hole conference in 2005, Rajan warned about the growing risks in the financial system and proposed policies that would reduce such risks. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers called the warnings "misguided" and Rajan himself a "luddite". However, following the financial crisis of 2007–2008, Rajan's views came to be seen as prescient and he was extensively interviewed for the Academy Awards-winning documentary Inside Job (2010).
6. Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian,social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He holds a joint appointment as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona, and is the author of more than 100 books on topics such as linguistics,war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
7. Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman studied ‘Introduction to Theoretical Physics’ in his second year at MIT, an advanced class intended for postgraduate students, and graduated in 1939. He then studied a PhD at Princeton University before working on the Manhattan Project, having been persuaded to help build the first atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could. He went on to lecture at both Cornell University and Caltech whilst developing significant research in quantum electrodynamics, leading to his Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.
Summary
The mission of MIT is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.
MIT contributions have touched everyday's human life and became a highly recognisable research Insitution to reckon with in the fields of Science, Technology , Economics and Other Fields of Humanilities.
It had became synonymous with Outstanding Research Institute , producing some of the higly globally recognisable Scholars , Scientists , Technologists, Technocrats , Economists, Linguists and also an Institution housing large number of Nobel Laureates in the World.
MM. Rao
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