MIT.edu  
77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 - 617.253.1000

1861 - MIT Incorporated - William Barton Rogers is president.
1865 - First classes in Boston Back Bay
1873 - First female graduate
1882 - MIT establishes, within the Department of Physics,
       the nation's first curriculum in electrical engineering.
1914 - Course in engineering administration established
1914 - First formal course in aeronautial engineering
      (11 yrs after Wright Bros. first flight)
1916 - Campus moved from Boston just across the Charles River to Cambridge.
1931 - MIT establishes the Alfred P. Sloan Fellows Program, the first program
       in the U.S. to provide mid-career managers with expertise in management.
1932 - Administration create three schools (Engineering, Science, and Architecture)
1941 - Doctoral program in economics established.
1940-45 - MIT's Radiation Laboratory (Rad Lab) created. It was responsible for
      most of the microwave radars used by the U.S. during World War II. 
1945 - Vannevar Bush authored the article "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly
    in which he first proposed his idea of the Memex machine, which would help people sort
    through the enormous amount of published information available throughout the world.
1940's and 50's - Paul Samuelson applies mathematical techniques to economic analysis
       Wins the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1970
1950 - School of Management established
1951 - Lincoln Lab opened as a technical and scientific research center
       on electronic systems.
1951 - Course in nuclear engineering organized.
1963 - Project MAC (Mathematics and Computation) organized 
     (name changed to Laboratory for Computer Science in 1975)
1968 - MIT and Wellesley agree to cross registration of their students.
1970 - Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology is established.
1982 - Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research established
1983 - Project Athena, to explore the use of computers in the educational process
1984 - MIT establishes the Media Laboratory.

MIT is ranked number 1 or tied for 1 in 6 of 8 science and engineering diciplines and number 2 in the others in US News and World report's ranking of U.S. Graduate schools.
It is also tied for number 1 in economics and in the top 10 in political science.

They are usually ranked from 2 to 5 in the world among all Universities.

MIT is also a leader in entrepreneurship.
In MIT's Entrepreneurial Development and Impact Over the Past 50 Years (2010), professor Edward B. Roberts summarizes their 2006 study of MIT alumni:
MIT alums launched 25,800 companies still active, employing 3.3 million people and and generated revenues of almost one trillion dollars. Put in other terms, living MIT alumni constitute the equivalent of the eleventh largest economy in the world.

Another report says:
MIT is the center of a world-leading biotech cluster, with 95 biotech companies clustered around the Kendall Square area. Prof. Fiona Murray found that 65 out of MIT's 493 life scientists have founded or served on the boards of directors of at least one venture-funded company.

MIT's Sloan School of Management is ranked number 3 for entrepreneurship

See MIT Entrepreneurship Review

Lincoln Lab - Research center for electronic systems.
Media Laboratory - Envisioning the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life.
CogNet - Online location for the brain and cognitive science research and interchange.
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research

• 29 are Nobel Laureates.
• More than one-third of the nation's space flights have included MIT-educated astronauts
• Architecture - IM Pei
• Economics, Business & Finance -
  Lawrence Summers '75, former Secretary of the Treasury
  Ben Bernanke - Chairman of the Federal Reserve
  Alfred P. Sloan 1895, long-time President & Chairman, General Motors
  Amar Bose '51 founder, Bose Corporation
• Computing -
  Mitch Kapor '80, founder, Lotus Development Corporation
  Kenneth Olsen '50, founder, Digital Equipment Corporation
  Ray Kurzweil '70, inventor of OCR and speech-to-text technologies
• Science -
  George Smoot - Black body form, cosmic microwave background radiation.
  Robert Van de Graaff - Designer of the Van de Graaff generator,
      a device which produces High voltages.
  
• Politics -
  John H. Sununu '63, Governor of New Hampshire (1983-89) and former White House Chief of Staff under President George H. W. Bush
  John E. Sununu '87, former US Senator
  Benjamin Netanyahu '75, prime minister of Israel
• Radio - Tom Magliozzi '58 and Ray Magliozzi '72, Click & Clack from NPR's Car Talk