*** Welcome to piglix ***

Danny Hillis

Daniel Hillis
Danny Hillis, 2014 (crop).jpg
Hillis in 2014
Born William Daniel Hillis
(1956-09-25) September 25, 1956 (age 60)
Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
Residence Cambridge, Massachusetts
Nationality American
Fields Computer Science
Computer Engineering
Institutions Thinking Machines
Walt Disney Imagineering
Applied Minds
Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Doctoral advisor Marvin Minsky
Gerald Jay Sussman
Claude Shannon
Notable awards Dan David Prize (2002)
Grace Murray Hopper Award (1989)

William Daniel "Danny" Hillis (born September 25, 1956) is an American inventor, engineer, mathematician, entrepreneur, and author. He co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a company that developed the Connection Machine, a parallel supercomputer designed by Hillis at MIT. He is also co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, Applied Minds, Metaweb Technologies, Applied Proteomics, and author of The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. He is Judge Widney Professor of Engineering and Medicine at the University of Southern California.

Hillis was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1956. His father, William Hillis, was a US Air Force epidemiologist studying hepatitis in Africa and relocated with his family through Rwanda, Burundi, Republic of the Congo, and Kenya. He spent a brief part of his childhood in Calcutta, India when his father was a visiting faculty at ISI, Calcutta. During these years the young Hillis was home schooled by his mother Argye Briggs Hillis, a biostatistician, and developed an early appreciation for mathematics and biology. His younger brother is David Hillis, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Texas at Austin, and his sister is Argye E. Hillis, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University.


...
Wikipedia

...