title: Amal Clooney

text: Her family left Lebanon when she was two years old, during the Lebanese Civil War, and settled in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire.


title: Amal Clooney

text: Her father Ramzi Alamuddin, a Lebanese Druze from the Alam al-Din dynasty village of Baakline in the Chouf District, received his MBA degree at the American University of Beirut. He returned to Lebanon in 1991 after the end of the civil war.


title: Amal Clooney

text: Her mother, Baria (née Miknass), is half Tunisian and half Palestinian-Jordanian from a family of Sunni Muslims in Tripoli in Northern Lebanon, and was a political journalist and foreign editor of the Saudi-run newspaper "al-Hayat". She is a founder of the public relations company International Communication Experts, which is part of a larger company that specialises in celebrity guest bookings, publicity photography, and event promotion.


title: Amal Clooney

text: Clooney has three siblings: one sister (Tala) and two half-brothers from her father's first marriage.


title: Amal Clooney

text: Clooney attended Dr Challoner's High School, a girls' grammar school located in Little Chalfont, Buckinghamshire, prior to university. She then studied at St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she received an exhibition grant and the Shrigley Award. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in jurisprudence in 2000. The following year she entered New York University School of Law to study for the Master of Laws (LL.M) degree. She received the Jack J. Katz Memorial Award for excellence in entertainment law. While at NYU she worked for one semester in the office of Sonia Sotomayor, then a judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and NYU Law faculty member.


title: Amal Clooney

text: Clooney is qualified to practice law in the United States, and England and Wales. She was admitted to the bar in New York in 2002, and called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2010. She has also practised at international courts in The Hague, including the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.


title: Amal Clooney

text: Clooney worked at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York City for three years as part of the Criminal Defense and Investigations Group, where her clients included Enron and Arthur Andersen.


title: Amal Clooney

text: She completed a judicial clerkship at the International Court of Justice in 2004, serving under Judge Vladlen S. Vereshchetin from Russia, Judge Nabil Elaraby from Egypt, and ad hoc Judge Sir Franklin Berman from the United Kingdom.


title: Amal Clooney

text: She was subsequently based in The Hague working in the Office of the Prosecutor at the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon and at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where she was Judicial assistant to Judge Patrick Robinson, Presiding Judge. The case charged the former President of former Republic of Yugoslavia with crimes allegedly committed in Kosovo, Croatia, and Bosnia during the war in the former Yugoslavia.


title: Amal Clooney

text: In 2010, Clooney was called to the Bar of England & Wales, Inner Temple. She is a practising barrister at Doughty Street Chambers. Clooney is ranked in the legal directories Legal 500 and Chambers and Partners as a leading barrister in international human rights law, public international law, and international criminal law. She is described as 'a brilliant legal mind' who 'handles cases of real international importance' and 'knows her brief inside out'. She is said to be a 'natural lead advocate' who is 'tactically first class' and 'a rare combination of intellectual depth and pragmatism'. The directories also spotlight her 'superb advocacy' and 'commanding presence before courts' and describe her as 'a dream performer before international tribunals'. They also emphasize that she is 'fantastically innovative' with an ability to galvanize 'heads of state, foreign ministers and business ... in a way that is very effective' for victims of human rights abuses. She is described as 'unafraid to raise novel points of law', 'very sophisticated in pushing the boundaries' and having a 'passionate commitment to the law and compassion for the people it serves'.


title: Amal Clooney

text: Clooney represents clients before international courts including the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. She represents victims of mass atrocities, including genocide and sexual violence and is representing a group of Iraqi victims from the Yazidi community seeking accountability for genocide and other crimes perpetrated by ISIS, including Nobel Peace Prize Laurette, Nadia Murad. Clooney is also representing Yazidi victims in a landmark case, alleging complicity in crimes against humanity by a French company, Lafarge for allegedly funded ISIS to keep open a plant in northern Syria that operated between 2011 and 2014. In 2021, Clooney was co-plaintiff's and victims' counsel in the first case in which an ISIS member was convicted of genocide and sentenced to life in prison.


title: Amal Clooney

text: Clooney regularly represents journalists and is currently leading the international counsel team acting for Filipino journalist and CEO of the news website Rappler, Maria Ressa. Ressa faces a series of legal charges that could lead to about 100 years in prison. Ressa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her 'courageous fight for freedom of expression in the Philippines'. Clooney previously represented Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, two Reuters journalists from Myanmar who were sentenced to seven years in prison by the government for reporting on crimes committed against Rohingyas by the Myanmar forces. They were released in May 2019.


title: Amal Clooney

text: Since 2015, Clooney has been a visiting faculty member and a senior fellow of Columbia Law School's Human Rights Institute, where she co-teaches the Human Rights Course with Professor Sarah H. Cleveland. Clooney has also lectured students on international criminal law at the SOAS School of Law in London, The New School in New York City, The Hague Academy of International Law, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


title: Amal Clooney

text: Clooney is the co-founder and co-president of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, which she co-founded with her husband George Clooney in 2016.


title: Amal Clooney

text: She partnered with the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative in beginning the Amal Clooney Scholarship, which was created to send one female student from Lebanon to the United World College Dilijan each year, to enroll in a two-year International Baccalaureate (IB) programme.


title: Amal Clooney

text: Clooney and her husband sponsored a Yazidi student, Hazim Avdal, whom she met via her work with Nadia Murad as Avdal worked at Yazda. Avdal was attending the University of Chicago.


title: Amal Clooney

text: In 2018, following the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, the Clooneys pledged $500,000 to the March for Our Lives and said they would be in attendance.


title: Amal Clooney

text: She became engaged to actor George Clooney on 28 April 2014. They had first met through a mutual friend in July 2013. On 7 August 2014, the couple obtained marriage licences in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London. They married on 27 September 2014 in Venice's city hall (at Ca' Farsetti), following a high-profile wedding ceremony two days earlier, also in Venice. They were married by Clooney's friend Walter Veltroni, former mayor of Rome. The wedding was widely reported in the media. In October 2014, it was announced that the Clooneys had bought the Mill House on an island in the River Thames at Sonning Eye in England at a cost of around £10 million.


title: Amal Clooney

text: In February 2017, it was reported by the CBS talk show "The Talk" that Clooney was pregnant. Friend Matt Damon confirmed the pregnancy to "Entertainment Tonight". In June 2017, she gave birth to fraternal twins.


title: Arabic

text: Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world. Having emerged in the 1st century, it is named after the Arab people; the term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula, as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece.


title: Arabic

text: Since the 7th century, Arabic has been characterized by diglossia, with an opposition between a standard prestige language—i.e., Literary Arabic: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Classical Arabic—and diverse vernacular varieties, which serve as mother tongues. Colloquial dialects vary significantly from MSA, impeding mutual intelligibility. MSA is only acquired through formal education and is not spoken natively. It is the language of literature, official documents, and formal written media. In spoken form, MSA is used in formal contexts, news bulletins and for prayers. This variety is the lingua franca of the Arab world and the liturgical language of Islam. It is an official language of 26 states and 1 disputed territory, the third most after English and French. It is also one of six official languages of the United Nations.


title: Arabic

text: Spoken varieties are the usual medium of communication in all other domains. They are not standardized and vary significantly, some of them being mutually unintelligible. The International Organization for Standardization assigns language codes to 33 varieties of Arabic, including MSA. Arabic vernaculars do not descend from MSA or Classical Arabic. Combined, Arabic dialects have 362 million native speakers, while MSA is spoken by 274 million L2 speakers, making it the sixth most spoken language in the world.


title: Arabic

text: Arabic is traditionally written with the Arabic alphabet, a right-to-left abjad. This alphabet is the official script for MSA. Colloquial varieties were traditionally not written, however, with the emergence of social media, the amount of written dialects has significantly increased online. Besides the Arabic alphabet, dialects are also often written in Latin from left to right or in Hebrew characters (in Israel) with no standardized orthography. Maltese is the only colloquial variety officially written in a Latin alphabet.


title: Arabic

text: Arabic is usually classified as a Central Semitic language. Linguists still differ as to the best classification of Semitic language sub-groups. The Semitic languages changed significantly between Proto-Semitic and the emergence of Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include:


title: Arabic

text: There are several features which Classical Arabic, the modern Arabic varieties, as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety, including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of the northern Hejaz. These features are evidence of common descent from a hypothetical ancestor, Proto-Arabic. The following features can be reconstructed with confidence for Proto-Arabic:


title: Arabic

text: On the other hand, several Arabic varieties are closer to other Semitic languages and maintain features not found in Classical Arabic, indicating that these varieties cannot have developed from Classical Arabic. Thus, Arabic vernaculars do not descend from Classical Arabic: Classical Arabic is a sister language rather than their direct ancestor.


title: Arabic

text: Arabia boasted a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity. In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside of the Ancient South Arabian family (e.g. Southern Thamudic) were spoken. It is also believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages (non-Central Semitic languages) were also spoken in southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of northern Hejaz, Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages. In and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested. In eastern Arabia, inscriptions in a script derived from ASA attest to a language known as Hasaitic. Finally, on the northwestern frontier of Arabia, various languages known to scholars as Thamudic B, Thamudic D, Safaitic, and Hismaic are attested. The last two share important isoglosses with later forms of Arabic, leading scholars to theorize that Safaitic and Hismaic are in fact early forms of Arabic and that they should be considered Old Arabic.


title: Arabic

text: Linguists generally believe that "Old Arabic" (a collection of related dialects that constitute the precursor of Arabic) first emerged around the 1st century CE. Previously, the earliest attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic script at , in southern present-day Saudi Arabia. However, this inscription does not participate in several of the key innovations of the Arabic language group, such as the conversion of Semitic mimation to nunation in the singular. It is best reassessed as a separate language on the Central Semitic dialect continuum.


title: Arabic

text: It was also thought that Old Arabic coexisted alongside—and then gradually displaced--epigraphic Ancient North Arabian (ANA), which was theorized to have been the regional tongue for many centuries. ANA, despite its name, was considered a very distinct language, and mutually unintelligible, from "Arabic". Scholars named its variant dialects after the towns where the inscriptions were discovered (Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Hismaic, Safaitic). However, most arguments for a single ANA language or language family were based on the shape of the definite article, a prefixed h-. It has been argued that the h- is an archaism and not a shared innovation, and thus unsuitable for language classification, rendering the hypothesis of an ANA language family untenable. Safaitic and Hismaic, previously considered ANA, should be considered Old Arabic due to the fact that they participate in the innovations common to all forms of Arabic.The earliest attestation of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script are three lines of poetry by a man named Garm(')allāhe found in En Avdat, Israel, and dated to around 125 CE. This is followed by the Namara inscription, an epitaph of the king Imru' al-Qays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found at Namaraa, Syria. From the 4th to the 6th centuries, the Nabataean script evolves into the Arabic script recognizable from the early Islamic era. There are inscriptions in an undotted, 17-letter Arabic script dating to the 6th century CE, found at four locations in Syria (Zabad, Jabal 'Usays, , ). The oldest surviving papyrus in Arabic dates to 643 CE, and it uses dots to produce the modern 28-letter Arabic alphabet. The language of that papyrus and of the Qur'an are referred to by linguists as "Quranic Arabic", as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into "Classical Arabic".


title: Arabic

text: In late pre-Islamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in the Hejaz, which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic had been institutionally standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra, most strongly in Judeo-Christian texts, keeping alive ancient features eliminated from the "learned" tradition (Classical Arabic).


title: Arabic

text: Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali (–689) is credited with standardizing Arabic grammar, or "an-naḥw" ( "the way"), and pioneering a system of diacritics to differentiate consonants ( "nuqat l-i'jām" "pointing for non-Arabs") and indicate vocalization ( "at-tashkil"). Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi (718 – 786) compiled the first Arabic dictionary, "Kitāb al-'Ayn" ( "The Book of the Letter ع"), and is credited with establishing the rules of Arabic prosody. Al-Jahiz (776-868) proposed to Al-Akhfash al-Akbar an overhaul of the grammar of Arabic, but it would not come to pass for two centuries. The standardization of Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century. The first comprehensive description of the "ʿarabiyya" "Arabic", Sībawayhi's "al"-"Kitāb", is based first of all upon a corpus of poetic texts, in addition to Qur'an usage and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the "ʿarabiyya".


title: Arabic

text: Arabic spread with the spread of Islam. Following the early Muslim conquests, Arabic gained vocabulary from Middle Persian and Turkish. In the early Abbasid period, many Classical Greek terms entered Arabic through translations carried out at Baghdad's House of Wisdom.


title: Arabic

text: By the 8th century, knowledge of Classical Arabic had become an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world, both for Muslims and non-Muslims. For example, Maimonides, the Andalusi Jewish philosopher, authored works in Judeo-Arabic—Arabic written in Hebrew script—including his famous "The Guide for the Perplexed" (, "Dalālat al-ḥāʾirīn").


title: Arabic

text: Ibn Jinni of Mosul, a pioneer in phonology, wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as "Kitāb Al-Munṣif, Kitāb Al-Muḥtasab, and" .


title: Arabic

text: Ibn Mada' of Cordoba (1116–1196) realized the overhaul of Arabic grammar first proposed by Al-Jahiz 200 years prior.


title: Arabic

text: The Maghrebi lexicographer Ibn Manzur compiled Lisān al-ʿArab (, "Tongue of Arabs"), a major reference dictionary of Arabic, in 1290.


title: Arabic

text: Charles Ferguson's koine theory claims that the modern Arabic dialects collectively descend from a single military koine that sprang up during the Islamic conquests; this view has been challenged in recent times. Ahmad al-Jallad proposes that there were at least two considerably distinct types of Arabic on the eve of the conquests: Northern and Central (Al-Jallad 2009). The modern dialects emerged from a new contact situation produced following the conquests. Instead of the emergence of a single or multiple koines, the dialects contain several sedimentary layers of borrowed and areal features, which they absorbed at different points in their linguistic histories. According to Veersteegh and Bickerton, colloquial Arabic dialects arose from pidginized Arabic formed from contact between Arabs and conquered peoples. Pidginization and subsequent creolization among Arabs and arabized peoples could explain relative morphological and phonological simplicity of vernacular Arabic compared to Classical and MSA.


title: Arabic

text: In around the 11th and 12th centuries in al-Andalus, the "zajal" and "muwashah" poetry forms developed in the dialectical Arabic of Cordoba and the Maghreb.


title: Arabic

text: The "Nahda" was a cultural and especially literary renaissance of the 19th century in which writers sought "to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression." According to James L. Gelvin, ""Nahda" writers attempted to simplify the Arabic language and script so that it might be accessible to a wider audience."In the wake of the industrial revolution and European hegemony and colonialism, pioneering Arabic presses, such as the Amiri Press established by Muhammad Ali (1819), dramatically changed the diffusion and consumption of Arabic literature and publications. Rifa'a al-Tahtawi proposed the establishment of in 1836 and led a translation campaign that highlighted the need for a lexical injection in Arabic, to suit concepts of the industrial and post-industrial age. In response, a number of Arabic academies modeled after the "Académie française" were established with the aim of developing standardized additions to the Arabic lexicon to suit these transformations, first in Damascus (1919), then in Cairo (1932), Baghdad (1948), Rabat (1960), Amman (1977), (1993), and Tunis (1993). In 1997, a bureau of Arabization standardization was added to the Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization of the Arab League. These academies and organizations have worked toward the Arabization of the sciences, creating terms in Arabic to describe new concepts, toward the standardization of these new terms throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and toward the development of Arabic as a world language. This gave rise to what Western scholars call Modern Standard Arabic. From the 1950s, Arabization became a postcolonial nationalist policy in countries such as Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Sudan.


title: Arabic

text: "Arabic" usually refers to Standard Arabic, which Western linguists divide into Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. It could also refer to any of a variety of regional vernacular Arabic dialects, which are not necessarily mutually intelligible.


title: Arabic

text: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) largely follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties and has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the industrial and post-industrial era, especially in modern times. Due to its grounding in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic is removed over a millennium from everyday speech, which is construed as a multitude of dialects of this language. These dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are described by some scholars as not mutually comprehensible. The former are usually acquired in families, while the latter is taught in formal education settings. However, there have been studies reporting some degree of comprehension of stories told in the standard variety among preschool-aged children. The relation between Modern Standard Arabic and these dialects is sometimes compared to that of Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin vernaculars (which became Romance languages) in medieval and early modern Europe.


title: Arabic

text: MSA uses much Classical vocabulary (e.g., "" 'to go') that is not present in the spoken varieties, but deletes Classical words that sound obsolete in MSA. In addition, MSA has borrowed or coined many terms for concepts that did not exist in Quranic times, and MSA continues to evolve.


title: Arabic

text: "Colloquial" or "dialectal" Arabic refers to the many national or regional varieties which constitute the everyday spoken language. Colloquial Arabic has many regional variants; geographically distant varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible, and some linguists consider them distinct languages. However, research indicates a high degree of mutual intelligibility between closely related Arabic variants for native speakers listening to words, sentences, and texts; and between more distantly related dialects in interactional situations.


title: Arabic

text: The varieties are typically unwritten. They are often used in informal spoken media, such as soap operas and talk shows, as well as occasionally in certain forms of written media such as poetry and printed advertising.


title: Arabic

text: Hassaniya Arabic and Maltese are only varieties of modern Arabic to have acquired official status. The Senegalese government adopted the Latin script to write Hassaniya Maltese is spoken in (predominantly Catholic) Malta and written with the Latin script. Linguists agree that it is a variety of spoken Arabic, descended from Siculo-Arabic, though it has experienced extensive changes as a result of sustained and intensive contact with Italo-Romance varieties, and more recently also with English. Due to "a mix of social, cultural, historical, political, and indeed linguistic factors," many Maltese people today consider their language Semitic but not a type of Arabic.


title: Arabic

text: The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia, which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. "Tawleed" is the process of giving a new shade of meaning to an old classical word. For example, "al-hatif" lexicographically, means the one whose sound is heard but whose person remains unseen. Now the term "al-hatif" is used for a telephone. Therefore, the process of "tawleed" can express the needs of modern civilization in a manner that would appear to be originally Arabic. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their school-taught Standard Arabic as well as their native dialects, which depending on the region may be mutually unintelligible. Some of these dialects can be considered to constitute separate languages which may have "sub-dialects" of their own.


title: Arabic

text: The issue of whether Arabic is one language or many languages is politically charged, in the same way it is for the varieties of Chinese, Hindi and Urdu, Serbian and Croatian, Scots and English, etc. In contrast to speakers of Hindi and Urdu who claim they cannot understand each other even when they can, speakers of the varieties of Arabic will claim they can all understand each other even when they cannot. While there is a minimum level of comprehension between all Arabic dialects, this level can increase or decrease based on geographic proximity: for example, Levantine and Gulf speakers understand each other much better than they do speakers from the Maghreb. The issue of diglossia between spoken and written language is a significant complicating factor: A single written form, significantly different from any of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites a number of sometimes divergent spoken forms. For political reasons, Arabs mostly assert that they all speak a single language, despite significant issues of mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions.


title: Arabic

text: From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages.


title: Arabic

text: With the sole example of Medieval linguist Abu Hayyan al-Gharnati – who, while a scholar of the Arabic language, was not ethnically Arab – Medieval scholars of the Arabic language made no efforts at studying comparative linguistics, considering all other languages inferior.


title: Arabic

text: In modern times, the educated upper classes in the Arab world have taken a nearly opposite view. Yasir Suleiman wrote in 2011 that "studying and knowing English or French in most of the Middle East and North Africa have become a badge of sophistication and modernity and ... feigning, or asserting, weakness or lack of facility in Arabic is sometimes paraded as a sign of status, class, and perversely, even education through a mélange of code-switching practises."


title: Arabic

text: Arabic has been taught worldwide in many elementary and secondary schools, especially Muslim schools. Universities around the world have classes that teach Arabic as part of their foreign languages, Middle Eastern studies, and religious studies courses. Arabic language schools exist to assist students to learn Arabic outside the academic world. There are many Arabic language schools in the Arab world and other Muslim countries. Because the Quran is written in Arabic and all Islamic terms are in Arabic, millions of Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab) study the language. Software and books with tapes are also important part of Arabic learning, as many of Arabic learners may live in places where there are no academic or Arabic language school classes available. Radio series of Arabic language classes are also provided from some radio stations. A number of websites on the Internet provide online classes for all levels as a means of distance education; most teach Modern Standard Arabic, but some teach regional varieties from numerous countries.


title: Arabic

text: The most important sources of borrowings into (pre-Islamic) Arabic are from the related (Semitic) languages Aramaic, which used to be the principal, international language of communication throughout the ancient Near and Middle East, and Ethiopic.


title: Arabic

text: A comprehensive overview of the influence of other languages on Arabic is found in Lucas & Manfredi (2020).


title: Arabic

text: The influence of Arabic has been most important in Islamic countries, because it is the language of the Islamic sacred book, the Quran. Arabic is also an important source of vocabulary for languages such as Amharic, Azerbaijani, Baluchi, Bengali, Berber, Bosnian, Chaldean, Chechen, Chittagonian, Croatian, Dagestani, Dhivehi, English, German, Gujarati, Hausa, Hindi, Kazakh, Kurdish, Kutchi, Kyrgyz, Malay (Malaysian and Indonesian), Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Rohingya, Romance languages (French, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Sicilian, Spanish, etc.) Saraiki, Sindhi, Somali, Sylheti, Swahili, Tagalog, Tigrinya, Turkish, Turkmen, Urdu, Uyghur, Uzbek, Visayan and Wolof, as well as other languages in countries where these languages are spoken. Modern Hebrew has been also influenced by Arabic especially during the process of revival, as MSA was used as a source for modern Hebrew vocabulary and roots.


title: Arabic

text: In addition, English has many Arabic loanwords, some directly, but most via other Mediterranean languages. Examples of such words include admiral, adobe, alchemy, alcohol, algebra, algorithm, alkaline, almanac, amber, arsenal, assassin, candy, carat, cipher, coffee, cotton, ghoul, hazard, jar, kismet, lemon, loofah, magazine, mattress, sherbet, sofa, sumac, tariff, and zenith. Other languages such as Maltese and Kinubi derive ultimately from Arabic, rather than merely borrowing vocabulary or grammatical rules.


title: Arabic

text: Arabic words also made their way into several West African languages as Islam spread across the Sahara. Variants of Arabic words such as "kitāb" ("book") have spread to the languages of African groups who had no direct contact with Arab traders.


title: Arabic

text: According to Charles A. Ferguson, the following are some of the characteristic features of the koiné that underlies all the modern dialects outside the Arabian peninsula. Although many other features are common to most or all of these varieties, Ferguson believes that these features in particular are unlikely to have evolved independently more than once or twice and together suggest the existence of the koine:


title: Arabic

text: Of the 29 Proto-Semitic consonants, only one has been lost: , which merged with , while became (see Semitic languages). Various other consonants have changed their sound too, but have remained distinct. An original lenited to , and – consistently attested in pre-Islamic Greek transcription of Arabic languages – became palatalized to or by the time of the Quran and , , or after early Muslim conquests and in MSA (see Arabic phonology#Local variations for more detail). An original voiceless alveolar lateral fricative became . Its emphatic counterpart was considered by Arabs to be the most unusual sound in Arabic (Hence the Classical Arabic's appellation ' or "language of the '"); for most modern dialects, it has become an emphatic stop with loss of the laterality or with complete loss of any pharyngealization or velarization, . (The classical " pronunciation of pharyngealization still occurs in the Mehri language, and the similar sound without velarization, , exists in other Modern South Arabian languages.)


title: Arabic

text: Other changes may also have happened. Classical Arabic pronunciation is not thoroughly recorded and different reconstructions of the sound system of Proto-Semitic propose different phonetic values. One example is the emphatic consonants, which are pharyngealized in modern pronunciations but may have been velarized in the eighth century and glottalized in Proto-Semitic.


title: Arabic

text: The phoneme is represented by the Arabic letter " () and has many standard pronunciations. is characteristic of north Algeria, Iraq, and most of the Arabian peninsula but with an allophonic in some positions; occurs in most of the Levant and most of North Africa; and is standard in Egypt, coastal Yemen, and western Oman. Generally this corresponds with the pronunciation in the colloquial dialects. In Sudan and Yemen, as well as in some Sudanese and Yemeni varieties, it may be either or , representing the original pronunciation of Classical Arabic.


title: Arabic

text: The emphatic consonant was actually pronounced , or possibly —either way, a highly unusual sound. The medieval Arabs actually termed their language "" 'the language of the Ḍād' (the name of the letter used for this sound), since they thought the sound was unique to their language. (In fact, it also exists in a few other minority Semitic languages, e.g., Mehri.)


title: Arabic

text: Arabic has consonants traditionally termed "emphatic" (), which exhibit simultaneous pharyngealization as well as varying degrees of velarization (depending on the region), so they may be written with the "Velarized or pharyngealized" diacritic () as: . This simultaneous articulation is described as "Retracted Tongue Root" by phonologists. In some transcription systems, emphasis is shown by capitalizing the letter, for example, is written ; in others the letter is underlined or has a dot below it, for example, .


title: Arabic

text: In surface pronunciation, every vowel must be preceded by a consonant (which may include the glottal stop ). There are no cases of hiatus within a word (where two vowels occur next to each other, without an intervening consonant). Some words do have an underlying vowel at the beginning, such as the definite article "al-" or words such as ' 'he bought', ' 'meeting'. When actually pronounced, one of three things happens:


title: Arabic

text: Word stress is not phonemically contrastive in Standard Arabic. It bears a strong relationship to vowel length. The basic rules for Modern Standard Arabic are:


title: Arabic

text: In most dialects, there may be more or fewer phonemes than those listed in the chart above. For example, is considered a native phoneme in most Arabic dialects except in Levantine dialects like Syrian or Lebanese where is pronounced and is pronounced . or () is considered a native phoneme in most dialects except in Egyptian and a number of Yemeni and Omani dialects where is pronounced . or and are distinguished in the dialects of Egypt, Sudan, the Levant and the Hejaz, but they have merged as in most dialects of the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Tunisia and have merged as in Morocco and Algeria. The usage of non-native and depends on the usage of each speaker but they might be more prevalent in some dialects than others. The Iraqi and Gulf Arabic also has the sound and writes it and with the Persian letters and , as in "plum"; "truffle".


title: Arabic

text: Early in the expansion of Arabic, the separate emphatic phonemes and coalesced into a single phoneme . Many dialects (such as Egyptian, Levantine, and much of the Maghreb) subsequently lost fricatives, converting into . Most dialects borrow "learned" words from the Standard language using the same pronunciation as for inherited words, but some dialects without interdental fricatives (particularly in Egypt and the Levant) render original in borrowed words as .


title: Arabic

text: Another key distinguishing mark of Arabic dialects is how they render the original velar and uvular plosives , (Proto-Semitic ), and :


title: Arabic

text: Pharyngealization of the emphatic consonants tends to weaken in many of the spoken varieties, and to spread from emphatic consonants to nearby sounds. In addition, the "emphatic" allophone automatically triggers pharyngealization of adjacent sounds in many dialects. As a result, it may be difficult or impossible to determine whether a given coronal consonant is phonemically emphatic or not, especially in dialects with long-distance emphasis spreading. (A notable exception is the sounds vs. in Moroccan Arabic, because the former is pronounced as an affricate but the latter is not.)


title: Arabic

text: As in other Semitic languages, Arabic has a complex and unusual morphology (i.e. method of constructing words from a basic root). Arabic has a nonconcatenative "root-and-pattern" morphology: A root consists of a set of bare consonants (usually three), which are fitted into a discontinuous pattern to form words. For example, the word for 'I wrote' is constructed by combining the root ' 'write' with the pattern ' 'I Xed' to form ' 'I wrote'. Other verbs meaning 'I Xed' will typically have the same pattern but with different consonants, e.g. ' 'I read', ' 'I ate', ' 'I went', although other patterns are possible (e.g. ' 'I drank', ' 'I said', ' 'I spoke', where the subpattern used to signal the past tense may change but the suffix ' is always used).


title: Arabic

text: Nouns in Literary Arabic have three grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, and genitive [also used when the noun is governed by a preposition]); three numbers (singular, dual and plural); two genders (masculine and feminine); and three "states" (indefinite, definite, and construct). The cases of singular nouns (other than those that end in long ā) are indicated by suffixed short vowels (/-u/ for nominative, /-a/ for accusative, /-i/ for genitive).


title: Arabic

text: The feminine singular is often marked by /-at/, which is pronounced as /-ah/ before a pause. Plural is indicated either through endings (the sound plural) or internal modification (the broken plural). Definite nouns include all proper nouns, all nouns in "construct state" and all nouns which are prefixed by the definite article /al-/. Indefinite singular nouns (other than those that end in long ā) add a final /-n/ to the case-marking vowels, giving /-un/, /-an/ or /-in/ (which is also referred to as nunation or tanwīn).


title: Arabic

text: Adjectives in Literary Arabic are marked for case, number, gender and state, as for nouns. However, the plural of all non-human nouns is always combined with a singular feminine adjective, which takes the /-at/ suffix.


title: Arabic

text: Pronouns in Literary Arabic are marked for person, number and gender. There are two varieties, independent pronouns and enclitics. Enclitic pronouns are attached to the end of a verb, noun or preposition and indicate verbal and prepositional objects or possession of nouns. The first-person singular pronoun has a different enclitic form used for verbs ( /-nī/) and for nouns or prepositions ( /-ī/ after consonants, /-ya/ after vowels).


title: Arabic

text: Nouns, verbs, pronouns and adjectives agree with each other in all respects. However, non-human plural nouns are grammatically considered to be feminine singular. Furthermore, a verb in a verb-initial sentence is marked as singular regardless of its semantic number when the subject of the verb is explicitly mentioned as a noun. Numerals between three and ten show "chiasmic" agreement, in that grammatically masculine numerals have feminine marking and vice versa.


title: Arabic

text: Verbs in Literary Arabic are marked for person (first, second, or third), gender, and number. They are conjugated in two major paradigms (past and non-past); two voices (active and passive); and six moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, jussive, shorter energetic and longer energetic), the fifth and sixth moods, the energetics, exist only in Classical Arabic but not in MSA. There are also two participles (active and passive) and a verbal noun, but no infinitive.


title: Arabic

text: The past and non-past paradigms are sometimes also termed perfective and imperfective, indicating the fact that they actually represent a combination of tense and aspect. The moods other than the indicative occur only in the non-past, and the future tense is signaled by prefixing ' or ' onto the non-past. The past and non-past differ in the form of the stem (e.g., past ' vs. non-past '), and also use completely different sets of affixes for indicating person, number and gender: In the past, the person, number and gender are fused into a single suffixal morpheme, while in the non-past, a combination of prefixes (primarily encoding person) and suffixes (primarily encoding gender and number) are used. The passive voice uses the same person/number/gender affixes but changes the vowels of the stem.


title: Arabic

text: The following shows a paradigm of a regular Arabic verb, "" 'to write'. In Modern Standard, the energetic mood (in either long or short form, which have the same meaning) is almost never used.


title: Arabic

text: Like other Semitic languages, and unlike most other languages, Arabic makes much more use of nonconcatenative morphology (applying many templates applied roots) to derive words than adding prefixes or suffixes to words.


title: Arabic

text: For verbs, a given root can occur in many different derived verb stems (of which there are about fifteen), each with one or more characteristic meanings and each with its own templates for the past and non-past stems, active and passive participles, and verbal noun. These are referred to by Western scholars as "Form I", "Form II", and so on through "Form XV" (although Forms XI to XV are rare). These stems encode grammatical functions such as the causative, intensive and reflexive. Stems sharing the same root consonants represent separate verbs, albeit often semantically related, and each is the basis for its own conjugational paradigm. As a result, these derived stems are part of the system of derivational morphology, not part of the inflectional system.


title: Arabic

text: Examples of the different verbs formed from the root ' 'write' (using ' 'red' for Form IX, which is limited to colors and physical defects):


title: Arabic

text: Form II is sometimes used to create transitive denominative verbs (verbs built from nouns); Form V is the equivalent used for intransitive denominatives.


title: Arabic

text: The associated participles and verbal nouns of a verb are the primary means of forming new lexical nouns in Arabic. This is similar to the process by which, for example, the English gerund "meeting" (similar to a verbal noun) has turned into a noun referring to a particular type of social, often work-related event where people gather together to have a "discussion" (another lexicalized verbal noun). Another fairly common means of forming nouns is through one of a limited number of patterns that can be applied directly to roots, such as the "nouns of location" in "ma-" (e.g. ' 'desk, office' < ' 'write', ' 'kitchen' < ' 'cook').


title: Arabic

text: The spoken dialects have lost the case distinctions and make only limited use of the dual (it occurs only on nouns and its use is no longer required in all circumstances). They have lost the mood distinctions other than imperative, but many have since gained new moods through the use of prefixes (most often /bi-/ for indicative vs. unmarked subjunctive). They have also mostly lost the indefinite "nunation" and the internal passive.


title: Arabic

text: The Arabic alphabet derives from the Aramaic through Nabatean, to which it bears a loose resemblance like that of Coptic or Cyrillic scripts to Greek script. Traditionally, there were several differences between the Western (North African) and Middle Eastern versions of the alphabet—in particular, the "faʼ" had a dot underneath and "qaf" a single dot above in the Maghreb, and the order of the letters was slightly different (at least when they were used as numerals).


title: Arabic

text: However, the old Maghrebi variant has been abandoned except for calligraphic purposes in the Maghreb itself, and remains in use mainly in the Quranic schools (zaouias) of West Africa. Arabic, like all other Semitic languages (except for the Latin-written Maltese, and the languages with the Ge'ez script), is written from right to left. There are several styles of scripts such as thuluth, muhaqqaq, tawqi, rayhan, and notably naskh, which is used in print and by computers, and ruqʻah, which is commonly used for correspondence.


title: Arabic

text: Originally Arabic was made up of only "rasm" without diacritical marks Later diacritical points (which in Arabic are referred to as "nuqaṯ") were added (which allowed readers to distinguish between letters such as b, t, th, n and y). Finally signs known as "Tashkil" were used for short vowels known as "harakat" and other uses such as final postnasalized or long vowels.


title: Arabic

text: After Khalil ibn Ahmad al Farahidi finally fixed the Arabic script around 786, many styles were developed, both for the writing down of the Quran and other books, and for inscriptions on monuments as decoration.


title: Arabic

text: In modern times the intrinsically calligraphic nature of the written Arabic form is haunted by the thought that a typographic approach to the language, necessary for digitized unification, will not always accurately maintain meanings conveyed through calligraphy.


title: Arabic

text: There are a number of different standards for the romanization of Arabic, i.e. methods of accurately and efficiently representing Arabic with the Latin script. There are various conflicting motivations involved, which leads to multiple systems. Some are interested in transliteration, i.e. representing the "spelling" of Arabic, while others focus on transcription, i.e. representing the "pronunciation" of Arabic. (They differ in that, for example, the same letter is used to represent both a consonant, as in "you" or "yet", and a vowel, as in "me" or "eat".) Some systems, e.g. for scholarly use, are intended to accurately and unambiguously represent the phonemes of Arabic, generally making the phonetics more explicit than the original word in the Arabic script. These systems are heavily reliant on diacritical marks such as "š" for the sound equivalently written "sh" in English. Other systems (e.g. the Bahá'í orthography) are intended to help readers who are neither Arabic speakers nor linguists with intuitive pronunciation of Arabic names and phrases. These less "scientific" systems tend to avoid diacritics and use digraphs (like "sh" and "kh"). These are usually simpler to read, but sacrifice the definiteness of the scientific systems, and may lead to ambiguities, e.g. whether to interpret "sh" as a single sound, as in "gash", or a combination of two sounds, as in "gashouse". The ALA-LC romanization solves this problem by separating the two sounds with a prime symbol ( ′ ); e.g., "as′hal" 'easier'.


title: Arabic

text: During the last few decades and especially since the 1990s, Western-invented text communication technologies have become prevalent in the Arab world, such as personal computers, the World Wide Web, email, bulletin board systems, IRC, instant messaging and mobile phone text messaging. Most of these technologies originally had the ability to communicate using the Latin script only, and some of them still do not have the Arabic script as an optional feature. As a result, Arabic speaking users communicated in these technologies by transliterating the Arabic text using the Latin script, sometimes known as IM Arabic.


title: Arabic

text: To handle those Arabic letters that cannot be accurately represented using the Latin script, numerals and other characters were appropriated. For example, the numeral "3" may be used to represent the Arabic letter . There is no universal name for this type of transliteration, but some have named it Arabic Chat Alphabet. Other systems of transliteration exist, such as using dots or capitalization to represent the "emphatic" counterparts of certain consonants. For instance, using capitalization, the letter , may be represented by d. Its emphatic counterpart, , may be written as D.


title: Arabic

text: In most of present-day North Africa, the Western Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) are used. However, in Egypt and Arabic-speaking countries to the east of it, the Eastern Arabic numerals ( – – – – – – – – – ) are in use. When representing a number in Arabic, the lowest-valued position is placed on the right, so the order of positions is the same as in left-to-right scripts. Sequences of digits such as telephone numbers are read from left to right, but numbers are spoken in the traditional Arabic fashion, with units and tens reversed from the modern English usage. For example, 24 is said "four and twenty" just like in the German language ("vierundzwanzig") and Classical Hebrew, and 1975 is said "a thousand and nine-hundred and five and seventy" or, more eloquently, "a thousand and nine-hundred five seventy".


title: Arabic

text: There have been many instances of national movements to convert Arabic script into Latin script or to Romanize the language. Currently, the only Arabic variety to use Latin script is Maltese.


title: Arabic

text: The Beirut newspaper "La Syrie" pushed for the change from Arabic script to Latin letters in 1922. The major head of this movement was Louis Massignon, a French Orientalist, who brought his concern before the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus in 1928. Massignon's attempt at Romanization failed as the academy and population viewed the proposal as an attempt from the Western world to take over their country. Sa'id Afghani, a member of the academy, mentioned that the movement to Romanize the script was a Zionist plan to dominate Lebanon. Said Akl created a Latin-based alphabet for Lebanese and used it in a newspaper he founded, "Lebnaan", as well as in some books he wrote.


title: Arabic

text: After the period of colonialism in Egypt, Egyptians were looking for a way to reclaim and re-emphasize Egyptian culture. As a result, some Egyptians pushed for an Egyptianization of the Arabic language in which the formal Arabic and the colloquial Arabic would be combined into one language and the Latin alphabet would be used. There was also the idea of finding a way to use Hieroglyphics instead of the Latin alphabet, but this was seen as too complicated to use. A scholar, Salama Musa agreed with the idea of applying a Latin alphabet to Arabic, as he believed that would allow Egypt to have a closer relationship with the West. He also believed that Latin script was key to the success of Egypt as it would allow for more advances in science and technology. This change in alphabet, he believed, would solve the problems inherent with Arabic, such as a lack of written vowels and difficulties writing foreign words that made it difficult for non-native speakers to learn. Ahmad Lutfi As Sayid and Muhammad Azmi, two Egyptian intellectuals, agreed with Musa and supported the push for Romanization. The idea that Romanization was necessary for modernization and growth in Egypt continued with Abd Al-Aziz Fahmi in 1944. He was the chairman for the Writing and Grammar Committee for the Arabic Language Academy of Cairo. However, this effort failed as the Egyptian people felt a strong cultural tie to the Arabic alphabet. In particular, the older Egyptian generations believed that the Arabic alphabet had strong connections to Arab values and history, due to the long history of the Arabic alphabet (Shrivtiel, 189) in Muslim societies.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the most prestigious and highly ranked academic institutions in the world.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: Founded in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, MIT adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. MIT is one of three private land grant universities in the United States, the others being Cornell University and Tuskegee University. The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River, and encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Bates Center, and the Haystack Observatory, as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad and Whitehead Institutes.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: , 98 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 83 Marshall Scholars, 41 astronauts, 16 Chief Scientists of the US Air Force, and numerous heads of states have been affiliated with MIT. The institute also has a strong entrepreneurial culture and MIT alumni have founded or co-founded many notable companies. MIT is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and has received more Sloan Research Fellowships and Hertz Fellowships than any other university.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a "Conservatory of Art and Science", but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: Rogers, a graduate of William and Mary and professor at UVA, wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that:


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.<ref name="Angulo https://archive.org/details/williambartonrog00angu/page/155 155–156"></ref>


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: Two days after MIT was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT's first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes" and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT was informally called "Boston Tech". The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these "Boston Tech" years, MIT faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president (and former MIT faculty) Charles W. Eliot's repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College's Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: In 1916, the MIT administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge "Bucentaur" built for the occasion, to signify MIT's move to a spacious new campus largely consisting of filled land on a tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical "New Technology" campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious "Mr. Smith", starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, and founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million ($ million in 2015 dollars) in cash and Kodak stock to MIT.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. The Compton reforms "renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering". Unlike Ivy League schools, MIT catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants for its funding. The school was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at MIT that "the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school", a "partly unjustified" perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT's involvement in military science surged during World War II. In 1941, Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at MIT's Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing microwave radar. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gunsight, bombsight, and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper's Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind; and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, MIT became the nation's largest wartime R&D contractor (attracting some criticism of Bush), employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone and receiving in excess of $100 million ($ billion in 2015 dollars) before 1946. Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war government-sponsored research at MIT included SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: These activities affected MIT profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of "any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute" to match the return to peacetime, remembering the "academic tranquility of the prewar years", though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the terms of Karl Taylor Compton, president of MIT between 1930 and 1948; James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957; and Julius Adams Stratton, chancellor from 1952 to 1957, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, MIT no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and MIT's defense research. In this period MIT's various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. MIT ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities. Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to "greater strength and unity" after these times of turmoil. However six MIT students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as Michael Albert and George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT's role in military research and its suppression of these protests. (Richard Leacock's film, "November Actions", records some of these tumultuous events.)


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: In the 1980s, there was more controversy at MIT over its involvement in SDI (space weaponry) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare) research. More recently, MIT's research for the military has included work on robots, drones and 'battle suits'.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT has kept pace with and helped to advance the digital age. In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and networking technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at Project MAC, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive computer video games like "Spacewar!" and created much of modern hacker slang and culture. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980s: Richard Stallman's GNU Project and the subsequent Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980s at the AI Lab; the MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology; the World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee; the OpenCourseWare project has made course materials for over 2,000 MIT classes available online free of charge since 2002; and the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT was named a sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several successful development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus; the Tang Center for Management Education; several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into biology, brain and cognitive sciences, genomics, biotechnology, and cancer research; and a number of new "backlot" buildings on Vassar Street including the Stata Center. Construction on campus in the 2000s included expansions of the Media Lab, the Sloan School's eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest. In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research Council to investigate the interdisciplinary challenges posed by increasing global energy consumption.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: In 2001, inspired by the open source and open access movements, MIT launched OpenCourseWare to make the lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and lectures from the great majority of its courses available online for no charge, though without any formal accreditation for coursework completed. While the cost of supporting and hosting the project is high, OCW expanded in 2005 to include other universities as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which currently includes more than 250 academic institutions with content available in at least six languages. In 2011, MIT announced it would offer formal certification (but not credits or degrees) to online participants completing coursework in its "MITx" program, for a modest fee. The "edX" online platform supporting MITx was initially developed in partnership with Harvard and its analogous "Harvardx" initiative. The courseware platform is open source, and other universities have already joined and added their own course content. In March 2009 the MIT faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT has its own police force. Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013, MIT Police patrol officer Sean Collier was fatally shot by the suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, setting off a violent manhunt that shut down the campus and much of the Boston metropolitan area for a day. One week later, Collier's memorial service was attended by more than 10,000 people, in a ceremony hosted by the MIT community with thousands of police officers from the New England region and Canada. On November 25, 2013, MIT announced the creation of the Collier Medal, to be awarded annually to "an individual or group that embodies the character and qualities that Officer Collier exhibited as a member of the MIT community and in all aspects of his life". The announcement further stated that "Future recipients of the award will include those whose contributions exceed the boundaries of their profession, those who have contributed to building bridges across the community, and those who consistently and selflessly perform acts of kindness".


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: In September 2017, the school announced the creation of an artificial intelligence research lab called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. IBM will spend $240 million over the next decade, and the lab will be staffed by MIT and IBM scientists. In October 2018 MIT announced that it would open a new Schwarzman College of Computing dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, named after lead donor and The Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. The focus of the new college is to study not just AI, but interdisciplinary AI education, and how AI can be used in fields as diverse as history and biology. The cost of buildings and new faculty for the new college is expected to be $1 billion upon completion.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from California Institute of Technology, MIT, and industrial contractors, and funded by the National Science Foundation. It was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astronomy through the detection of gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. Gravitational waves were detected for the first time by the LIGO detector in 2015. For contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, two Caltech physicists, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, and MIT physicist Rainer Weiss won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Weiss, who is also an MIT graduate, designed the laser interferometric technique, which served as the essential blueprint for the LIGO.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT's campus in the city of Cambridge spans approximately a mile along the north side of the Charles River basin. The campus is divided roughly in half by Massachusetts Avenue, with most dormitories and student life facilities to the west and most academic buildings to the east. The bridge closest to MIT is the Harvard Bridge, which is known for being marked off in a non-standard unit of length – the smoot.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: The Kendall/MIT MBTA Red Line station is located on the northeastern edge of the campus, in Kendall Square. The Cambridge neighborhoods surrounding MIT are a mixture of high tech companies occupying both modern office and rehabilitated industrial buildings, as well as socio-economically diverse residential neighborhoods. In early 2016, MIT presented its updated Kendall Square Initiative to the City of Cambridge, with plans for mixed-use educational, retail, residential, startup incubator, and office space in a dense high-rise transit-oriented development plan. The MIT Museum will eventually be moved immediately adjacent to a Kendall Square subway entrance, joining the List Visual Arts Center on the eastern end of the campus.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: Each building at MIT has a number (possibly preceded by a "W", "N", "E", or "NW") designation, and most have a name as well. Typically, academic and office buildings are referred to primarily by number while residence halls are referred to by name. The organization of building numbers roughly corresponds to the order in which the buildings were built and their location relative (north, west, and east) to the original center cluster of Maclaurin buildings. Many of the buildings are connected above ground as well as through an extensive network of tunnels, providing protection from the Cambridge weather as well as a venue for roof and tunnel hacking.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT's on-campus nuclear reactor is one of the most powerful university-based nuclear reactors in the United States. The prominence of the reactor's containment building in a densely populated area has been controversial, but MIT maintains that it is well-secured. In 1999 Bill Gates donated US$20 million to MIT for the construction of a computer laboratory named the "William H. Gates Building", and designed by architect Frank Gehry. While Microsoft had previously given financial support to the institution, this was the first personal donation received from Gates.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT Nano, also known as Building 12, is an interdisciplinary facility for nanoscale research. Its cleanroom and research space, visible through expansive glass facades, is the largest research facility of its kind in the nation. With a cost of US$400 million, it is also one of the costliest buildings on campus. The facility also provides state-of-the-art nanoimaging capabilities with vibration damped imaging and metrology suites sitting atop a slab of concrete underground.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: Other notable campus facilities include a pressurized wind tunnel for testing aerodynamic research, a towing tank for testing ship and ocean structure designs, and previously Alcator C-Mod, which was the largest fusion device operated by any university. MIT's campus-wide wireless network was completed in the fall of 2005 and consists of nearly 3,000 access points covering of campus.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: In 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency sued MIT for violating the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act with regard to its hazardous waste storage and disposal procedures. MIT settled the suit by paying a $155,000 fine and launching three environmental projects. In connection with capital campaigns to expand the campus, the Institute has also extensively renovated existing buildings to improve their energy efficiency. MIT has also taken steps to reduce its environmental impact by running alternative fuel campus shuttles, subsidizing public transportation passes, and building a low-emission cogeneration plant that serves most of the campus electricity, heating, and cooling requirements.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT has substantial commercial real estate holdings in Cambridge on which it pays property taxes, plus an additional voluntary payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) on academic buildings which are legally tax-exempt. , it is the largest taxpayer in the city, contributing approximately 14% of the city's annual revenues. Holdings include Technology Square, parts of Kendall Square, and many properties in Cambridgeport and Area 4 neighboring the educational buildings. The land is held for investment purposes and potential long-term expansion.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT's School of Architecture, now the School of Architecture and Planning, was the first formal architecture program in the United States, and it has a history of commissioning progressive buildings. The first buildings constructed on the Cambridge campus, completed in 1916, are sometimes called the "Maclaurin buildings" after Institute president Richard Maclaurin who oversaw their construction. Designed by William Welles Bosworth, these imposing buildings were built of reinforced concrete, a first for a non-industrial – much less university – building in the US. Bosworth's design was influenced by the City Beautiful Movement of the early 1900s and features the Pantheon-esque Great Dome housing the Barker Engineering Library. The Great Dome overlooks Killian Court, where graduation ceremonies are held each year. The friezes of the limestone-clad buildings around Killian Court are engraved with the names of important scientists and philosophers. The spacious Building 7 atrium at 77 Massachusetts Avenue is regarded as the entrance to the Infinite Corridor and the rest of the campus.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: Alvar Aalto's Baker House (1947), Eero Saarinen's MIT Chapel and Kresge Auditorium (1955), and I.M. Pei's Green, Dreyfus, Landau, and Wiesner buildings represent high forms of post-war modernist architecture. More recent buildings like Frank Gehry's Stata Center (2004), Steven Holl's Simmons Hall (2002), Charles Correa's Building 46 (2005), and Fumihiko Maki's Media Lab Extension (2009) stand out among the Boston area's classical architecture and serve as examples of contemporary campus "starchitecture". These buildings have not always been well received; in 2010, "The Princeton Review" included MIT in a list of twenty schools whose campuses are "tiny, unsightly, or both".


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: Undergraduates are guaranteed four-year housing in one of MIT's 11 undergraduate dormitories. Those living on campus can receive support and mentoring from live-in graduate student tutors, resident advisors, and faculty housemasters. Because housing assignments are made based on the preferences of the students themselves, diverse social atmospheres can be sustained in different living groups; for example, according to the "Yale Daily News" staff's "The Insider's Guide to the Colleges, 2010", "The split between East Campus and West Campus is a significant characteristic of MIT. East Campus has gained a reputation as a thriving counterculture." MIT also has 5 dormitories for single graduate students and 2 apartment buildings on campus for married student families.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT has an active Greek and co-op housing system, including thirty-six fraternities, sororities, and independent living groups (FSILGs). , 98% of all undergraduates lived in MIT-affiliated housing; 54% of the men participated in fraternities and 20% of the women were involved in sororities. Most FSILGs are located across the river in Back Bay near where MIT was founded, and there is also a cluster of fraternities on MIT's West Campus that face the Charles River Basin. After the 1997 alcohol-related death of Scott Krueger, a new pledge at the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, MIT required all freshmen to live in the dormitory system starting in 2002. Because FSILGs had previously housed as many as 300 freshmen off-campus, the new policy could not be implemented until Simmons Hall opened in that year.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: In 2013–2014, MIT abruptly closed and then demolished undergrad dorm Bexley Hall, citing extensive water damage that made repairs infeasible. In 2017, MIT shut down Senior House after a century of service as an undergrad dorm. That year, MIT administrators released data showing just 60% of Senior House residents had graduated in four years. Campus-wide, the four-year graduation rate is 84% (the cumulative graduation rate is significantly higher).


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT is chartered as a non-profit organization and is owned and governed by a privately appointed board of trustees known as the MIT Corporation. The current board consists of 43 members elected to five-year terms, 25 life members who vote until their 75th birthday, 3 elected officers (President, Treasurer, and Secretary), and 4 "ex officio" members (the president of the alumni association, the Governor of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Secretary of Education, and the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court). The board is chaired by Diane Greene SM ’78, co-founder and former CEO of VMware and former CEO of Google Cloud. The Corporation approves the budget, new programs, degrees and faculty appointments, and elects the President to serve as the chief executive officer of the university and preside over the Institute's faculty. MIT's endowment and other financial assets are managed through a subsidiary called MIT Investment Management Company (MITIMCo). Valued at $16.4 billion in 2018, MIT's endowment was then the sixth-largest among American colleges and universities.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT has five schools (Science, Engineering, Architecture and Planning, Management, and Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences) and one college (Schwarzman College of Computing), but no schools of law or medicine. While faculty committees assert substantial control over many areas of MIT's curriculum, research, student life, and administrative affairs, the chair of each of MIT's 32 academic departments reports to the dean of that department's school, who in turn reports to the Provost under the President. The current president is L. Rafael Reif, who formerly served as provost under President Susan Hockfield, the first woman to hold the post. Sally Kornbluth, a cell biologist and provost at Duke University will become MIT's 18th president in January 2023.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT is a large, highly residential, research university with a majority of enrollments in graduate and professional programs. The university has been accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges since 1929. MIT operates on a 4–1–4 academic calendar with the fall semester beginning after Labor Day and ending in mid-December, a 4-week "Independent Activities Period" in the month of January, and the spring semester commencing in early February and ceasing in late May.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT students refer to both their majors and classes using numbers or acronyms alone. Departments and their corresponding majors are numbered in the approximate order of their foundation; for example, Civil and Environmental Engineering is , while Linguistics and Philosophy is . Students majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), the most popular department, collectively identify themselves as "Course 6". MIT students use a combination of the department's course number and the number assigned to the class to identify their subjects; for instance, the introductory calculus-based classical mechanics course is simply "8.01" at MIT.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: The four-year, full-time undergraduate program maintains a balance between professional majors and those in the arts and sciences. In 2010, it was dubbed "most selective" by "U.S. News", admitting few transfer students and 4.1% of its applicants in the 2020–2021 admissions cycle. MIT offers 44 undergraduate degrees across its five schools. In the 2017–2018 academic year, 1,045 Bachelor of Science degrees (abbreviated "SB") were granted, the only type of undergraduate degree MIT now awards. In the 2011 fall term, among students who had designated a major, the School of Engineering was the most popular division, enrolling 63% of students in its 19 degree programs, followed by the School of Science (29%), School of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences (3.7%), Sloan School of Management (3.3%), and School of Architecture and Planning (2%). The largest undergraduate degree programs were in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (), Computer Science and Engineering (), Mechanical Engineering (), Physics (), and Mathematics ().


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: All undergraduates are required to complete a core curriculum called the General Institute Requirements (GIRs). The Science Requirement, generally completed during freshman year as prerequisites for classes in science and engineering majors, comprises two semesters of physics, two semesters of calculus, one semester of chemistry, and one semester of biology. There is a Laboratory Requirement, usually satisfied by an appropriate class in a course major. The Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) Requirement consists of eight semesters of classes in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, including at least one semester from each division as well as the courses required for a designated concentration in a HASS division. Under the Communication Requirement, two of the HASS classes, plus two of the classes taken in the designated major must be "communication-intensive", including "substantial instruction and practice in oral presentation". Finally, all students are required to complete a swimming test; non-varsity athletes must also take four quarters of physical education classes.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: Most classes rely on a combination of lectures, recitations led by associate professors or graduate students, weekly problem sets ("p-sets"), and periodic quizzes or tests. While the pace and difficulty of MIT coursework has been compared to "drinking from a fire hose", the freshmen retention rate at MIT is similar to other research universities. The "pass/no-record" grading system relieves some pressure for first-year undergraduates. For each class taken in the fall term, freshmen transcripts will either report only that the class was passed, or otherwise not have any record of it. In the spring term, passing grades (A, B, C) appear on the transcript while non-passing grades are again not recorded. (Grading had previously been "pass/no record" all freshman year, but was amended for the Class of 2006 to prevent students from gaming the system by completing required major classes in their freshman year.) Also, freshmen may choose to join alternative learning communities, such as Experimental Study Group, Concourse, or Terrascope.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: In 1969, Margaret MacVicar founded the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) to enable undergraduates to collaborate directly with faculty members and researchers. Students join or initiate research projects ("UROPs") for academic credit, pay, or on a volunteer basis through postings on the UROP website or by contacting faculty members directly. A substantial majority of undergraduates participate. Students often become published, file patent applications, and/or launch start-up companies based upon their experience in UROPs.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: In 1970, the then-Dean of Institute Relations, Benson R. Snyder, published "The Hidden Curriculum," arguing that education at MIT was often slighted in favor of following a set of unwritten expectations and that graduating with good grades was more often the product of figuring out the system rather than a solid education. The successful student, according to Snyder, was the one who was able to discern which of the formal requirements were to be ignored in favor of which unstated norms. For example, organized student groups had compiled "course bibles"—collections of problem-set and examination questions and answers for later students to use as references. This sort of gamesmanship, Snyder argued, hindered development of a creative intellect and contributed to student discontent and unrest.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT's graduate program has high coexistence with the undergraduate program, and many courses are taken by qualified students at both levels. MIT offers a comprehensive doctoral program with degrees in the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields as well as professional degrees, including the Master of Business Administration (MBA). The Institute offers graduate programs leading to academic degrees such as the Master of Science (which is abbreviated as SM at MIT), various Engineer's Degrees, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), and Doctor of Science (ScD) and interdisciplinary graduate programs such as the MD-PhD (with Harvard Medical School) and a joint program in oceanography with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: Admission to graduate programs is decentralized; applicants apply directly to the department or degree program. More than 90% of doctoral students are supported by fellowships, research assistantships (RAs), or teaching assistantships (TAs).


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT Bootcamps are intense week-long innovation and leadership programs that challenge participants to develop a venture in a week. Each Bootcamp centers around a particular topic, specific to an industry, leadership skill set, or emerging technology. Cohorts are organized into small teams who work on an entrepreneurial project together, in addition to individual learning and team coaching. The program includes a series of online seminars with MIT faculty, practitioners, and industry experts, innovation workshops with bootcamp instructors focused on putting the theory participants have learned into practice, coaching sessions, and informal office hours for learners to exchange ideas freely. Bootcampers are tasked with weekly "deliverables," which are key elements of a business plan, to help guide the group through the decision-making process involved in building an enterprise. The experience culminates in a final pitch session, judged by a panel of experts.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT Bootcamp instructors include Eric von Hippel, Sanjay Sarma, Erdin Beshimov, and Bill Aulet. MIT Bootcamps were founded by Erdin Beshimov.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT places among the top five in many overall rankings of universities (see table right) and rankings based on students' revealed preferences. For several years, "U.S. News & World Report", the QS World University Rankings, and the Academic Ranking of World Universities have ranked MIT's School of Engineering first, as did the 1995 National Research Council report. In the same lists, MIT's strongest showings apart from in engineering are in computer science, the natural sciences, business, architecture, economics, linguistics, mathematics, and, to a lesser extent, political science and philosophy.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: Times Higher Education has recognized MIT as one of the world's "six super brands" on its "World Reputation Rankings", along with Berkeley, Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford. In 2019, it was ranked #3 among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings. In 2017, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings also rated MIT the #2 university for arts and humanities. MIT was ranked #7 in 2015 and #6 in 2017 of the Nature Index Annual Tables, which measure the largest contributors to papers published in 82 leading journals. Georgetown University researchers ranked MIT #3 in the US for 20-year return on investment.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: The university historically pioneered research and training collaborations between academia, industry and government.  In 1946, President Compton, Harvard Business School professor Georges Doriot, and Massachusetts Investor Trust chairman Merrill Grisswold founded American Research and Development Corporation, the first American venture-capital firm.  In 1948, Compton established the MIT Industrial Liaison Program. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, American politicians and business leaders accused MIT and other universities of contributing to a declining economy by transferring taxpayer-funded research and technology to international – especially Japanese – firms that were competing with struggling American businesses. On the other hand, MIT's extensive collaboration with the federal government on research projects has led to several MIT leaders serving as presidential scientific advisers since 1940. MIT established a Washington Office in 1991 to continue effective lobbying for research funding and national science policy.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: The US Justice Department began an investigation in 1989, and in 1991 filed an antitrust suit against MIT, the eight Ivy League colleges, and eleven other institutions for allegedly engaging in price-fixing during their annual "Overlap Meetings", which were held to prevent bidding wars over promising prospective students from consuming funds for need-based scholarships. While the Ivy League institutions settled, MIT contested the charges, arguing that the practice was not anti-competitive because it ensured the availability of aid for the greatest number of students. MIT ultimately prevailed when the Justice Department dropped the case in 1994.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT's proximity to Harvard University ("the other school up the river") has led to a substantial number of research collaborations such as the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and the Broad Institute. In addition, students at the two schools can cross-register for credits toward their own school's degrees without any additional fees. A cross-registration program between MIT and Wellesley College has also existed since 1969, and in 2002 the Cambridge–MIT Institute launched an undergraduate exchange program between MIT and the University of Cambridge. MIT also has a long-term partnership with Imperial College London, for both student exchanges and research collaboration. More modest cross-registration programs have been established with Boston University, Brandeis University, Tufts University, Massachusetts College of Art, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT maintains substantial research and faculty ties with independent research organizations in the Boston area, such as the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Ongoing international research and educational collaborations include the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute), Singapore-MIT Alliance, MIT-Politecnico di Milano, MIT-Zaragoza International Logistics Program, and projects in other countries through the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) program.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: The mass-market magazine "Technology Review" is published by MIT through a subsidiary company, as is a special edition that also serves as an alumni magazine. The MIT Press is a major university press, publishing over 200 books and 30 journals annually, emphasizing science and technology as well as arts, architecture, new media, current events, and social issues.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: The MIT library system consists of five subject libraries: Barker (Engineering), Dewey (Economics), Hayden (Humanities and Science), Lewis (Music), and Rotch (Arts and Architecture). There are also various specialized libraries and archives. The libraries contain more than 2.9 million printed volumes, 2.4 million microforms, 49,000 print or electronic journal subscriptions, and 670 reference databases. The past decade has seen a trend of increased focus on digital over print resources in the libraries. Notable collections include the Lewis Music Library with an emphasis on 20th and 21st-century music and electronic music, the List Visual Arts Center's rotating exhibitions of contemporary art, and the Compton Gallery's cross-disciplinary exhibitions. MIT allocates a percentage of the budget for all new construction and renovation to commission and support its extensive public art and outdoor sculpture collection.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: The MIT Museum was founded in 1971 and collects, preserves, and exhibits artifacts significant to the culture and history of MIT. The museum now engages in significant educational outreach programs for the general public, including the annual Cambridge Science Festival, the first celebration of this kind in the United States. Since 2005, its official mission has been, "to engage the wider community with MIT's science, technology and other areas of scholarship in ways that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century".


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: MIT was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934 and is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity"; research expenditures totaled $952 million in 2017. The federal government was the largest source of sponsored research, with the Department of Health and Human Services granting $255.9 million, Department of Defense $97.5 million, Department of Energy $65.8 million, National Science Foundation $61.4 million, and NASA $27.4 million. MIT employs approximately 1300 researchers in addition to faculty. In 2011, MIT faculty and researchers disclosed 632 inventions, were issued 153 patents, earned $85.4 million in cash income, and received $69.6 million in royalties. Through programs like the Deshpande Center, MIT faculty leverage their research and discoveries into multi-million-dollar commercial ventures.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: In electronics, magnetic-core memory, radar, single-electron transistors, and inertial guidance controls were invented or substantially developed by MIT researchers. Harold Eugene Edgerton was a pioneer in high-speed photography and sonar. Claude E. Shannon developed much of modern information theory and discovered the application of Boolean logic to digital circuit design theory. In the domain of computer science, MIT faculty and researchers made fundamental contributions to cybernetics, artificial intelligence, computer languages, machine learning, robotics, and cryptography. At least nine Turing Award laureates and seven recipients of the Draper Prize in engineering have been or are currently associated with MIT.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: Current and previous physics faculty have won eight Nobel Prizes, four Dirac Medals, and three Wolf Prizes predominantly for their contributions to subatomic and quantum theory. Members of the chemistry department have been awarded three Nobel Prizes and one Wolf Prize for the discovery of novel syntheses and methods. MIT biologists have been awarded six Nobel Prizes for their contributions to genetics, immunology, oncology, and molecular biology. Professor Eric Lander was one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project. Positronium atoms, synthetic penicillin, synthetic self-replicating molecules, and the genetic bases for Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease) and Huntington's disease were first discovered at MIT. Jerome Lettvin transformed the study of cognitive science with his paper "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain". Researchers developed a system to convert MRI scans into 3D printed physical models.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: In the domain of humanities, arts, and social sciences, as of October 2019 MIT economists have been awarded seven Nobel Prizes and nine John Bates Clark Medals. Linguists Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle authored seminal texts on generative grammar and phonology. The MIT Media Lab, founded in 1985 within the School of Architecture and Planning and known for its unconventional research, has been home to influential researchers such as constructivist educator and Logo creator Seymour Papert.


title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

text: Spanning many of the above fields, MacArthur Fellowships (the so-called "Genius Grants") have been awarded to 50 people associated with MIT. Five Pulitzer Prize–winning writers currently work at or have retired from MIT. Four current or former faculty are members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.