page_title: Yale University
section_title: Notable alumni and faculty
hierarchical_section_title: Yale University / Notable people / Notable alumni and faculty
caption_attribution_description: Red Sox GM Theo Epstein – Rays vs Red Sox 9/8/10
context_page_description: Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school's largest benefactor, Elihu Yale.
  Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers. It moved to New Haven in 1716 and shortly after was renamed Yale College in recognition of a gift from British East India Company governor Elihu Yale. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale's faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.
context_section_description: Yale has produced alumni distinguished in their respective fields. This includes U.S. Presidents William Howard Taft, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; heads of state, including Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Governor-General Francis Burton Harrison,  and Malawian president Peter Mutharika; U.S. Supreme Court Justices Taft, Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh; Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, and Steven Mnuchin; and United States Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi. Confederate States Secretary of State, Secretary of War, and Attorney General; Judah P. Benjamin.
  Some royals have attended, among them: Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon, Prince Rostislav Romanov and Prince Akiiki Hosea Nyabongo;
  In the arts, Yale alumni include authors Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Vincent Benét, John Hersey, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, William Matthews, and Tom Wolfe; actors, directors, playwrights, and producers Tarell Alvin McCraney, Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Henry Winkler, Vincent Price, Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Angela Bassett, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Douglas Wick, Claire Danes, Edward Norton, Lupita Nyong'o, James Whitmore, Oliver Stone, Brian Dennehy, Joshua Malina, and Sam Waterston; composers Charles Ives, Douglas Moore and Cole Porter; visual artists Matthew Barney, Eva Hesse, Alex Israel, Robert L. Levers, Jr., Brice Marden, Wangechi Mutu, Richard Serra, and Kehinde Wiley; fine art photography popularizer Sam Wagstaff; entertainer Rudy Vallee; photographer and writer Nicholas Muellner; and architectural critic Alexandra Lange.
  In business, Time magazine co-founder Henry Luce, Morgan Stanley founder Harold Stanley, Blackstone Group founder Stephen A. Schwarzman, Boeing and United Airlines founder William Boeing, FedEx founder Frederick W. Smith, chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, Electronic Arts co-founder Bing Gordon, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton all hail from Yale.
  In academia, distinguished Yale graduates and faculty have included theologian and religious scholar Kathryn Tanner, philosopher of religion John E. Hare, literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Paul Krugman; Nobel laureates in Physics, Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project director Francis S. Collins; "father of biochemistry" Russell Henry Chittenden; neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; chairman of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Committee Clark Blanchard Millikan; education philosopher Robert Maynard Hutchins; pioneer in fractal geometry Benoit Mandelbrot; mathematician/chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; U.S. National Women's Hall of Fame member and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; and anthropologist Sabine Hyland.
  Former Yale students in the sporting arena include "The perfect oarsman" Rusty Wailes; Olympic silver medalist rower Josh West; Olympic silver and bronze medalist Sada Jacobson; runner Frank Shorter; baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss, and baseball players Ron Darling, Bill Hutchinson, and Craig Breslow; basketball player Chris Dudley; football players Dick Jauron, Kenny Hill, Calvin Hill, Gary Fencik, Chuck Mercein, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and "Father of American Football" Walter Camp; nine-time U.S. Squash men's champion Julian Illingworth; ice hockey player Chris Higgins; figure skater Sarah Hughes; swimmer Don Schollander; and Olympic figure skater Nathan Chen.
  Yale also counts among its former students Secretary of 
caption: Theo Epstein
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