technologia: Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are practical jokes and pranks meant to prominently demonstrate technical aptitude and cleverness, and/or to commemorate popular culture and political topics. The pranks are anonymously installed at night by hackers, usually, but not exclusively, undergraduate students. The hackers' actions are governed by an informal yet extensive body of precedent, tradition and ethics. Hacks can occur anywhere across campus, and occasionally off campus; many make use of the iconic Great Dome, Little Dome, Green Building tower, or other prominent architectural features of the MIT campus. The most well-known hacker is Richard Stallman, winner of the MacArt…

Evidence: 39 • authority: 72

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology occupies a 168-acre (68 ha) tract in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The campus spans approximately one mile (1.6 km) of the north side of the Charles River basin directly opposite the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The campus includes dozens of buildings representing diverse architectural styles and shifting campus priorities over MIT's history. MIT's architectural history can be broadly split into four eras: the Boston campus, the new Cambridge campus before World War II, the "Cold War" development, and post-Cold War buildings. Each era was marked by distinct building campaigns characterized by, successively, neoclassical…

Evidence: 39 • authority: 72

The college rivalry between the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) stems from the colleges' reputations as the top science and engineering schools in the United States. The rivalry is unusual given the geographic distance between the schools, one being in Pasadena, California, and the other in Cambridge, Massachusetts (their campuses are separated by about 3000 miles and are on opposite coasts of the United States, with Caltech and MIT being on the West Coast and Eastern Seaboard respectively), as well as its focus on elaborate pranks rather than sporting events. One pranking war was instigated in April 2005, when Caltech student…

Evidence: 39 • authority: 72

MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to publish "virtually all" of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere. The project was announced on April 4, 2001, and uses the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license as its default. The program was originally funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT. MIT OpenCourseWare is supported by MIT, corporate underwriting, major gifts, and donations from site visitors. The initiative inspired a number of other institutions to make their co…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

This list of Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni includes students who studied as undergraduates or graduate students at MIT's School of Engineering; School of Science; MIT Sloan School of Management; School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; School of Architecture and Planning; or Whitaker College of Health Sciences. Since there are more than 120,000 alumni (living and deceased), this listing cannot be comprehensive. Instead, this article summarizes some of the more notable MIT alumni, with some indication of the reasons they are notable in the world at large. All MIT degrees are earned through academic achievement, in that MIT has never awarded honorary degrees in any form…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The MIT School of Architecture and Planning (MIT SAP, stylized as SA+P) is one of the five schools of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1865 by William Robert Ware, the school offered the first architecture curriculum in the United States and was the first architecture program established within a university. MIT's Department of Architecture has consistently ranked among the top architecture/built environment schools in the world. In the 20th century, the school came to be known by introducing modernism to America. MIT has a history of commissioning progressive buildings, many of which were designed by faculty or former students associated wit…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Cecil and Ida Green Building, also called the Green Building or Building 54, is an academic and research building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The building houses the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). It is one of the tallest buildings in Cambridge. The Green Building was designed by I. M. Pei, who received a bachelor's degree in architecture from MIT in 1940, and Araldo Cossutta. Principal donor Cecil Howard Green received a bachelor's degree and master's degree from MIT and was a co-founder of Texas Instruments.