Danny Hillis

William Daniel "Danny" Hillis (born September 25, 1956, in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and author. He co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a company that developed the Connection Machine, a parallel supercomputer designed by Hillis at MIT. He is also co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, Applied Minds, Metaweb, and author of The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. Daniel Hillis was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1956. His father was a US Air Force epidemiologist studying hepatitis in Africa and moved with his family through Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, and Kenya. During these years the young Hillis was home schooled by his mother, a biostatistician, and developed an early appreciation for mathematics and biology. In 1978 Hillis graduated from MIT with a BS degree in mathematics, followed in 1981 with an MS degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), specializing in robotics. During this time Hillis...