Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded shortly before the American Civil War and universally known as “MIT,” is located just across the Charles River from downtown Boston. Starting from the MIT campus, if you walk, cycle, or drive in a westerly direction along Massachusetts Avenue (“Mass Ave,” to the locals), or ride the Red Line underneath it, you soon arrive at Harvard Square, with the bulk of the town of Cambridge sandwiched in between. Thus, MIT is not unlike a bookend paired with Harvard, geographically speaking, and academically speaking, as well, it looks upon itself very much as the equal of the older school.

The main difference, of course, is MIT’s greater emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines. This may be seen, above all, in the whopping 96 Nobel Laureates associated with the school, including such stellar names in physics as:

• Hans Bethe
• Max Born
• Richard Feynman
• Murray Gell-Mann
• Robert Laughlin
• Julian Schwinger
• Frank Wilczek
• Charles Townes

MIT-connected Nobel Laureates in chemistry include:

• Sidney Altman
• Thomas Cech
• Elias Corey
• Peter Debye
• Robert Mulliken
• Robert Woodward
• Ada Yonath

Among those awarded the Prize for their work in physiology or medicine are:

• Werner Arber
• David Baltimore
• Andrew Fire
• Leland Hartwell
• Robert Horvitz
• Salvador Luria
• Susumu Tonegawa

MIT also boasts 26 Turing Award recipients (second only to Stanford), including:

• Tim Berners-Lee
• Barbara Liskov
• Fernando Corbato
• Shafi Goldwasser
• Butler Lampson
• Ronald Rivest
• Silvio Micali
• Marvin Minsky
• Michael Stonebraker

As for mathematics, MIT can claim eight Fields Medalists, including:

• Paul Cohen
• Alessio Figalli
• John Milnor
• Daniel Quillen
• William Thurston

But MIT is not just about the STEM disciplines, important as they are. It is also highly respected for several of its social sciences departments, especially economics and linguistics.

In economics, MIT people include:

• George Akerlof
• Abhijit Banerjee
• Esther Duflo
• Bengt Holmström
• William Nordhaus
• Paul Romer
• Robert Shiller
• Richard Thaler
• Oliver Williamson
• Paul Krugman
• Joseph Stiglitz

As for linguistics, suffice it to say that MIT has been the academic home of Noam Chomsky since 1955. This fact alone has been enough to turn MIT into Ground Zero of the deep structure/transformational grammar revolution in the study of human language during the 1950s and 1960s, and a veritable Mecca for generations of students ever since. Chomsky’s theoretical innovations, which swept away most intellectual opposition decades ago, continue to this day to provide the basic conceptual framework for linguistics as an academic discipline.

Among MIT – connected philosophers, we may mention Saul Kripke and Hubert Dreyfus.