Former Stanford president John Hennessy and UC Berkeley professor emeritus Dave Patterson won the $1 million 2017 Alan Turing Award on Wednesday for their breakthrough work in designing energy-efficient chips in the 1980s that set the stage for smartphones’ omnipresence today.
And for folks who think the university makes the person (rather than the other way around), John Hennessy’s undergrad degree was from Viillanova and his PhD was from Stony Brook, both excellent schools (but very devalued by many folks on CC for not having enough prestigiosityness).
It is probably true., so choose the better school. It probably matters more about where you work.
Well said @harvardandberkeley Btw, Patterson got his grad and undergrad degrees from UCLA.
For the ranking obsessed, Villanova is ranked #46 overall and #99 for undergrad engineering by US News.
^ Those are stories, not statistics. Never use a sample of size one to generalize. Constantly practicing this reflects one’s basic education.
In the past 20 years, 30 persons have won the Turing Award. Only 1 received an undergraduate degree from Stanford. To be fair, only 2 institutions in the the past 20 years have had more than one undergrad degree holder winning a Turing: Berkeley with 4 and MIT with 2. Other than that, the list of institutions from which Turing award winners received their undergrad educations is pretty diverse: Villanova, UCLA, Oxford, NYU, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, Sapienza, Technion, Cambridge, Virginia, Texas, Athens, NY State Teachers College, Copenhagen, CUNY, CU Boulder, Yale, Tel Aviv, Oslo, Taiwan, Duke, Oregon State.
I think we can infer that the folks who make ground-breaking impacts in computer science earn their degrees from institutions from all over the world.
As a bonus factoid, the co-inventor of the microprocessor… a graduate of Stanford? Of Berkeley? Nope. Lil ole San Francisco State University.
@harvardandberkeley thanks. You beat me to it.
@ewho if you need more stats here it is
The Computer Museum Fellow is an award similar to the Turning award that honors people who who have made ground breaking contributions to CS. http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/ The Computer Museum Fellows are mostly from industry and less academic than the Turing winners.
If you look at where the ~80 fellows got their undergrad the pattern is similar to that of the Turing awards winners that HarvardandBerkeley posted. - MIT and Berkeley have the most with 8 and 7 respectively. Followed by Caltech(4), Duke(3),Harvard(3), and a few more with 2 each.
And this one even surprised me. Stanford has only one!
The list of winners also include alumni from ~40 diverse universities US and foreign universities, some of them are very good engineering schools such as RPI, Case Western, ULCA, Harvey Mudd, Drexel, Iowa state, Michigan, a community college (College of Marin), and many unknowns - University of Redlands, Olivetti etc
Missing from the list - Princeton, Dartmouth & UPenn.
Stanford created its undergraduate CS program in 1986. Before that, it only had a graduate CS program. So comparing the undergraduate Turing award winners does not imply anything for Stanford’s Quality of CS department. For comparison, Stanford’s CS faculty size is much smaller than CMU, MIT, and Berkley. But Stanford has most Turing award connections (27 in total, #1 in the world). Berkley and MIT were tied as #2, with 25.
Turing award graduates or attendees: Berkeley 11 people, Stanford 9, Harvard 9, Princeton 8, MIT 6. Berkley wins by size. MIT is also big in terms of # of graduates in CS.