History of MIT

Boston Magazine spotlights MIT’s leading role in the AI revolution in the Greater Boston area. “With a $2 million grant from the Department of Defense, MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab combines with a new research group, Project MAC, to create what’s now known as the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Over the next three years, researchers lead groundbreaking machine-learning projects such as the creation of Eliza, a psychotherapy-based computer program that could process languages and establish emotional connections with users (a primordial chatbot, essentially).”

The Economist spotlights the life of Prof. Emeritus Robert M. Solow, a Nobel laureate whose work in growth theory “added both to national spending and the economy’s productive capacity.” The Economist notes that: “the MIT culture he embodied disdained hierarchy, cherished collegial lunches and made time for students, many of whom became illustrious friends.”

Prof. Emeritus Robert M. Solow, recipient of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in economic growth theory, has died at age 99, reports Austen Hufford for Wall Street Journal.  “Heinstilled in the field of economics a focus on turning complex issues into simple formulas, allowing even freshman in college to grasp and debate important topics,” writes Hufford.

Prof. Emeritus Robert M. Solow, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Economics “for exploring the impact of technology on economic growth, work that spawned a wider understanding of what drives the expansion of industrial economics,” has died age 99, reports Edward Cowan for The Washington Post. “The strong role of technological progress identified by Dr. Solow contributed to a greater emphasis by governments on higher education and technological research,” writes Cowan.

Prof. Emeritus Robert M. Solow, a recipient of the 1987 Nobel Economics Prize who created a theoretical framework for growth theory – the branch of economics “which studies those factors that allow for increased production and improvements in economic welfare” – has died at age 99, reports Mike Feeney for The Boston Globe. “Dr. Solow was as celebrated among economists for who he was as for what he did,” writes Feeney. “His public-spiritedness, lucid writing, and sparkling, often self-deprecating wit made him a much-loved figure.”

Prof. Emeritus Robert M. Solow, a Nobel laureate whose work on economic growth became the model by which economists “came to practice their craft,” has died at age 99, reports Robert D. Hershey Jr., for The New York Times. Solow’s “work demonstrated the power of bringing mathematics to bear on important economic debates and simplifying the analysis by focusing on a small number of variables at a time,” writes Hershey.

Johanna Mayer and Katie Hafner from Scientific American’s “The Lost Women of Science podcast spotlight the late former Prof. Mária Telkes and her work focused on the development of solar energy. “Dr. Mária Telkes died in 1995, at age 94,” says Mayer. “But her legacy lives on. Today, the number of people installing solar panels in their homes is consistently rising – and in a recent Pew study, 39% of homeowners surveyed said they were seriously considering going solar.”

Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Associate Fred Salvucci BS '61 SM '62 speaks with GBH’s The Big Dig Podcast host Ian Coss about his role in Boston’s “Big Dig” project. “The idea for the Big Dig began with an unlikely friendship,” explains Coss. “During the highway debates in the early 70s, Fred Salvucci – one of the highway opponents – went to a ton of meetings. And across the table at many of those meetings was a man named Bill Reynolds; he was there to represent the road builders.”

Professor Karilyn Crockett speaks with GBH’s The Big Dig Podcast host Ian Coss about the impact of The “Big Dig” – Boston’s highway project – on the city, its people and urban planning. Crockett “argues that despite all the incentives to build, build, build, the costs of that building would eventually force city residents to think the unthinkable,” says Coss. “So the anti-highway fight becomes a moment of imagining possibilities,” says Crockett. 

William Pounds, the former dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management who was “famous for being willing to approach and talk to anybody,” has died at age 95. “As an administrator, he wanted to guide business school graduates to become able leaders of corporations like the ones where he had worked," writes Bryan Marquard for The Boston Globe.

Ivan Sutherland PhD ’63, whose work “laid some of the foundations of the digital world that surrounds us today,” speaks with Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner about the importance of fun and play in advancing technological research. “You’re no good at things you think aren’t fun,” Sutherland said. If you want to expand the scope of what’s possible today, he noted, “you need to play around with stuff to understand what it will do, and what it won’t do.”

Herbert Kalmus ‘03 and former MIT Prof. Daniel Frost Comstock ‘04 co-founded Technicolor, the company that helped bring color to the movies. Boston Globe correspondent Scott Kirsner notes that the company’s name was “an homage to MIT, which publishes a yearbook called Technique.” Kirsner adds that Technicolor engineers “had to develop their own cameras, shooting and lighting techniques on set, film processing, and add-ons to the movie projector... Technicolor became one of the giants of 20th-century Hollywood.”

New York Times reporter John Markoff spotlights Ivan Sutherland PhD ’63 and his contributions to the development of modern computing. Markoff notes that while working on his PhD thesis at MIT, Sutherland “created Sketchpad on a Lincoln TX-2 computer and started a revolution in computer graphics.”

Bob Metcalfe ’69, a CSAIL research affiliate and MIT Corporation life member emeritus, has been awarded this year’s Turing Award for his work inventing Ethernet, reports Randy Bean for Forbes. “Turing recipients include the greatest pioneers in the advancement of computer science,” says Metcalfe. “I am grateful to be considered among these giants.”

This year's Turing Award has been awarded to Bob Metcalfe ’69, a CSAIL research affiliate and MIT Corporation life member emeritus, for his work inventing Ethernet, a computer networking technology that for decades “has connected PCs to servers, printers and the internet in corporate offices and homes across the globe,” writes Cade Metz for The New York Times. “Almost everything you do online goes through Ethernet at some stage,” said Marc Weber of the Computer History Museum.