49 Fun Facts About MIT

MIT is located in which city, across the Charles River from Boston?

Cambridge. MIT spent its first half-century in Boston, then ferried its charter across the river on a ceremonial barge in 1916 to open the new campus.

Which war began two days after MIT was chartered?

The Civil War. Governor John Andrew signed the charter on 10 April 1861 and the fighting began two days later, so MIT's first classes had to wait until 1865.

MIT's founder William Barton Rogers led Virginia's first state survey as a scientist in which field?

Rogers's field was geology, and legend has it that his last words were 'bituminous coal': he collapsed and died while addressing MIT's graduating class in 1882.

By what informal name was MIT known in its early decades in the Back Bay?

Boston Tech. The name lasted half a century, until the school, cramped and short of money in the Back Bay, finally found the funds to move across the river in 1916.

MIT was funded in its early years under which 1862 federal law?

The Morrill Land-Grant Act gave states land to fund colleges 'for the benefit of agriculture and the mechanic arts', so Massachusetts used it for both a new farm college and the fledgling MIT.

Which university's president, a former MIT chemistry professor, tried again and again to absorb MIT?

Harvard. Charles Eliot pushed mergers for decades, and MIT's own board approved one over alumni protests, until a court ruled in 1905 that MIT could not sell its Back Bay land.

Which industrialist was unmasked in 1920 as 'Mr Smith', the anonymous donor behind MIT's riverside campus?

George Eastman, the Kodak founder, had given in secret as 'Mr Smith' since 1912; generations of students have since rubbed the nose on his bronze plaque at MIT for luck before exams.

In 1916 MIT's charter crossed the Charles on the Bucentaur, modelled on which city's ceremonial state barge?

Venice. The original Bucentaur was the doge's gilded state barge, from which he dropped a ring into the Adriatic each Ascension Day to 'wed' Venice to the sea.

What structural material did Bosworth use for MIT's Maclaurin buildings and Great Dome?

Reinforced concrete, then an unconventional and little-used building material, lies behind Bosworth's classical facades; engineer John Freeman had pushed for it over masonry walls.

Which physicist, MIT president from 1930, reorganised it into schools and pushed basic science?

Karl Compton. A General Electric executive on MIT's board recruited him from Princeton, convinced that industry now needed graduates grounded in fundamental science rather than shop practice.

The wartime 'Radiation Laboratory' at MIT was a cover name for work on what?

Microwave radar. The name was chosen to deceive: it was meant to make outsiders think the laboratory was working on nuclear physics, and so to hide the real mission.

MIT's ramshackle Building 20, thrown up in wartime and later home to Noam Chomsky, was fondly nicknamed what?

The Plywood Palace. Designed in less than an afternoon and meant to be torn down six months after the war, the timber building stayed in use until 1998.

MIT's off-campus Lincoln Laboratory was created in 1951 to develop what for the US military?

Lincoln Laboratory was set up to build a continental air-defence radar net after the first Soviet atomic bomb test, in 1949, raised the threat of long-range bombers; its SAGE system ran until 1983.

'Doc' Draper's MIT Instrumentation Laboratory built the computerised guidance for which space programme?

Apollo. The lab built the Apollo Guidance Computer that steered astronauts to the Moon, but Vietnam-era protests over its military work led MIT to spin it off as the independent Draper Laboratory in 1973.

The 4 March 1969 research stoppage at MIT against military science gave birth to which organisation?

The Union of Concerned Scientists. Its founders, MIT faculty and students, wanted research turned away from military technology and toward pressing environmental and social problems.

Which main-memory technology did MIT's Whirlwind computer adopt in 1953?

Jay Forrester's team replaced Whirlwind's unreliable storage tubes with magnetic cores in 1953, making the machine far faster and more dependable; Whirlwind was also among the first computers to run in real time.

MIT's hacker culture is traced back to which student club?

The Tech Model Railroad Club. Its Signals and Power crowd, keener on the switching under the layout than on the trains, popularised the word 'hacker' and went on to form the nucleus of MIT's AI Lab.

Which MIT AI Lab programmer launched the GNU Project in 1983 and the Free Software Foundation in 1985?

Richard Stallman, then at the MIT AI Lab, announced GNU in September 1983 and founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985, reacting to colleagues leaving for commercial Lisp-machine spinoffs.

Which network authentication protocol was created for MIT's Project Athena?

Kerberos. Named after the three-headed dog that guards Hades in Greek myth, it was built so that users could prove who they were without sending passwords unprotected across the campus network.

The MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by former president Jerome Wiesner and whom?

Nicholas Negroponte was the lab's first director, and in 2005 he founded One Laptop per Child, the non-profit that sent low-cost laptops to schoolchildren across the developing world.

Which web pioneer founded the W3C at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994?

Tim Berners-Lee. He left CERN for MIT and set up the consortium so that rival vendors, then shipping incompatible versions of HTML, would agree on common open standards.

Which MIT project, announced in 2001, set out to publish nearly all its teaching materials online for free?

OpenCourseWare. A faculty council that had been asked how MIT should position itself in online learning proposed giving the materials away, a plan MIT's president called 'counter-intuitive in a market driven world'.

In 2018 MIT announced a billion-dollar college of computing named after which donor?

Stephen Schwarzman. The Blackstone co-founder's $350 million gift anchored a plan to create 50 faculty posts, many shared with other departments, so that every field at MIT could work with AI.

Which phrase is the English rendering of MIT's Latin motto?

MIT's motto, mens et manus, means mind and hand: the founders wanted knowledge joined to practice, which is why the seal sets a craftsman beside a scholar.

MIT's mascot, Tim the Beaver, was chosen in 1914 because beavers are what?

Beavers are nature's engineers, alumnus Lester Gardner told a 1914 alumni dinner, having first weighed the kangaroo and the elephant; his clincher was that the beaver 'does his best work in the dark'.

At MIT, where majors go by number, what do students call Electrical Engineering and Computer Science?

Course 6. MIT numbers its departments roughly in the order they were founded, so civil engineering is Course 1, and students use the numbers in place of the names.

The heavy MIT class ring worn by upperclass students and alumni is nicknamed what?

The Brass Rat. The 'rat' is the beaver on its gold bezel, which is said to look more like a rat, and a committee of second-year students redesigns the ring for every class.

MIT's four-week stretch of optional classes and events each January is called what?

Independent Activities Period. First held in 1971, it is home to the Mystery Hunt, in which teams solve puzzles for days to find a 'coin' hidden somewhere on campus.

What is the long hallway through MIT's original buildings, starting at Lobby 7, called?

The Infinite Corridor. Civil engineering students once studied its foot traffic as a stand-in for a highway and wrote down its unwritten rules: stay right, pass left, no eye contact.

The twice-yearly event when the setting sun shines straight down MIT's longest hallway is nicknamed what?

MIThenge comes around 11 November and 31 January, and campus enthusiasts publish predictions timed to the second so that crowds can line the hallway for the few minutes it lasts.

One of the most famous MIT hacks, in May 1994, put what on top of the Great Dome?

A campus police car. Hackers assembled the shell of a Chevrolet over a wooden frame on the dome in a single night, lights flashing, with a dummy officer and a box of donuts inside.

MIT hackers once stole the cannon of which rival institution and shipped it across the country?

In 2006 MIT students posing as the 'Howe & Ser Moving Co.' hauled Caltech's Fleming Cannon from Pasadena to MIT's campus, a heist needing fund-raising, social engineering, rigging and precision machining.

The bridge beside MIT that carries Massachusetts Avenue into Boston is famously marked off in which non-standard unit of length?

Smoots: fraternity pledges measured the bridge in 1958 by laying the shortest of them, Oliver Smoot, end to end, 364.4 times 'plus or minus one ear'; he later chaired the American National Standards Institute.

MIT students who pass four set classes, among them archery and sailing, can claim which tongue-in-cheek certificate?

Pirate. Fencing and pistol complete the set, and the physical education department issues the certificate with a warning that it gives no licence to engage in piracy.

The wildly angular Stata Center, opened in 2004, was designed by which architect?

Frank Gehry. Three years after the building opened, MIT sued him and the builders over persistent leaks, cracking masonry, mould and ice sliding off the building.

Which MIT mathematician coined 'cybernetics' in his 1948 book of that name?

Norbert Wiener built the word on the Greek for 'steersman'; his wartime work on aiming anti-aircraft guns had set him thinking about feedback in machines and living things alike.

Which moonwalker wrote an MIT doctoral thesis on orbital rendezvous?

Buzz Aldrin. He got to test the subject on Gemini 12 in 1966: when the radar failed as he and Jim Lovell closed on their target, they completed the rendezvous by hand and eye.

In 2011 the founder of which audio company, an MIT professor, gave MIT a majority of its shares?

Bose. Amar Bose's gift came with strings: MIT collects the dividends but may not sell the non-voting shares or take any part in running the company.

Teams of MIT students spent years beating casinos at which game?

Blackjack. The players counted cards and ran the team like a business, with investors taking a share of the winnings, and their story inspired the 2008 film 21.

Which MIT economist, the 1970 Nobel laureate, wrote the best-selling textbook 'Economics'?

Paul Samuelson wrote the book for MIT's then-compulsory economics course; it carried Keynes's ideas to beginners and went on to sell millions of copies.

The 1999 MIT report led by biologist Nancy Hopkins documented what?

It documented bias against senior women faculty. Hopkins had begun by crawling round her building one night with a tape measure to prove her lab was smaller than her male colleagues', and in 1999 MIT admitted the discrimination publicly.

Under the aid policy MIT introduced in 2025, undergraduates pay no tuition if their family earns under which income?

$200,000. The threshold, in force from autumn 2025, takes in about four in five American households, and families earning under $100,000 pay nothing at all, housing and meals included.

Which chemist, the first woman admitted to MIT, later became its first female instructor?

Ellen Swallow Richards. Let in as a 'special student', she went on to found MIT's Women's Laboratory and to run the water survey that led Massachusetts to set America's first water-quality standards.

Which pioneer of photography argued in a 1957 MIT lecture that students should do original research from day one?

Edwin H. Land, the inventor of instant photography, later paid for the idea himself: his 1968 gift funded the much-copied programme that puts MIT undergraduates to work in research labs.

Under which president did MIT alone fight the 1991 Justice Department antitrust suit over financial aid?

Charles Vest, president from 1990 to 2004, took the 1991 suit to trial alone after the eight Ivies settled; MIT prevailed on appeal in 1993 and Congress then allowed limited need-based aid coordination.

Which MIT president did Eisenhower call to the White House as his science adviser weeks after Sputnik?

James Killian took the new post in November 1957, and the advisory committee he chaired went on to push school science reforms and to help bring NASA into being.

Which public-key cryptosystem is named after the initials of three MIT researchers?

RSA is named for Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, who published it in 1977; a British codebreaker, Clifford Cocks, had found the same method in secret four years earlier, and that stayed classified until 1997.

Which rock guitarist, founder of the band Boston, is an MIT alumnus?

Tom Scholz earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering at MIT and worked at Polaroid before Boston's 1976 debut album; he built much of the band's studio gear himself.

Who became MIT's eighteenth president, arriving as a cell biologist and former Duke provost?

Sally Kornbluth came to science late: her first degree, from Williams College, was in political science, and only then did she take a second, in genetics, in England.