A native of Queens, NY, Raymond Kurzweil has aspired to become an inventor since the age of five.
Most people try to forget about the worries of the day when they sleep.
At a young age, he was engrossed in imaginative and complex projects. At the age of eight, Kurzweil built a puppet theater with mechanical parts to change the scenery. By the time he was 16, he had built and programmed his own computer to compose original melodies, which were based on patterns in well-known classical works. This computer also earned him the opportunity to meet President Lyndon B. Johnson, as one of 40 Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners, and first prize in the International Science Fair. As an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965, Kurzweil took all nine computer courses that were offered at the time.