page_title: University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
section_title: Notable faculty and alumni
hierarchical_section_title: University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign / Notable faculty and alumni
caption_attribution_description: English: Eta Kappa Nu monument at the University of Illinois
context_page_description: The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University of Illinois system and was founded in 1867.
  The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". In fiscal year 2019, research expenditures at Illinois totaled $652 million. The campus library system possesses the second-largest university library in the United States by holdings after Harvard University. The university also hosts the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and is home to the fastest supercomputer on a university campus.
  The university contains 16 schools and colleges and offers more than 150 undergraduate and over 100 graduate programs of study. The university holds 651 buildings on 6,370 acres and its annual operating budget in 2016 was over $2 billion.
context_section_description: 25 alumni and faculty members of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign have won a Pulitzer Prize. As of 2019, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign alumni, faculty, and researchers include 30 Nobel laureates (including 11 alumni). In particular, John Bardeen is the only person to have won two Nobel prizes in physics, having done so in 1956 and 1972 while on faculty at the university. In 2003, two faculty members won Nobel prizes in different disciplines: Paul C. Lauterbur for physiology or medicine, and Anthony Leggett for physics.
  The alumni of the university have created companies and products such as Netscape Communications (formerly Mosaic) (Marc Andreessen), AMD (Jerry Sanders), PayPal (Max Levchin), Playboy (Hugh Hefner), National Football League (George Halas), Siebel Systems (Thomas Siebel), Mortal Kombat (Ed Boon), CDW (Michael Krasny), YouTube (Steve Chen and Jawed Karim), THX (Tomlinson Holman), Andreessen Horowitz (Marc Andreessen), Oracle (Larry Ellison and Bob Miner), Lotus (Ray Ozzie), Yelp! (Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons), Safari (Dave Hyatt), Firefox (Joe Hewitt), W. W. Grainger (William Wallace Grainger), Delta Air Lines (C. E. Woolman), Beckman Instruments (Arnold Beckman), BET (Robert L. Johnson), and Tesla Motors (Martin Eberhard).
  Alumni and faculty have invented the LED and the quantum well laser (Nick Holonyak, B.S. 1950, M.S. 1951, Ph.D. 1954), DSL (John Cioffi, B.S. 1978), JavaScript (Brendan Eich, M.S. 1986), the integrated circuit (Jack Kilby, B.S. 1947), the transistor (John Bardeen, faculty, 1951–1991), the pH meter (Arnold Beckman, B.S. 1922, M.S. 1923), MRI (Paul C. Lauterbur), the plasma screen (Donald Bitzer, B.S. 1955, M.S. 1956, Ph.D. 1960), color plasma display (Larry F. Weber B.S. 1968 M.S. 1971 Ph.D. 1975), the training methodology called PdEI and the coin counter (James P. Liautaud B.S. 1963), the statistical algorithm called Gibbs sampling in computer vision and the machine learning technique called random forests (Donald Geman, B.A. 1965), and are responsible for the structural design of such buildings as the Willis Tower, the John Hancock Center, and the Burj Khalifa.
  Mathematician Richard Hamming, known for the Hamming code and Hamming distance, earned a PhD in mathematics from the university's Mathematics Department in 1942. Structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan earned two master's degrees, and a PhD in structural engineering from the university.
  Alumni have also led several companies, including BitTorrent (Eric Klinker), Renaissance Technologies (Robert Mercer), Ticketmaster, McDonald's, Goldman Sachs, BP, Kodak, Shell, General Motors, Playboy, AT&T, General Electric,  and Flipkart.
  Alumni have founded many organizations, including the Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Project Gutenberg, and have served in a wide variety of government and public interest roles. Rafael Correa, President of The Republic of Ecuador since January 2006 secured his M.S. and PhD degrees from the university's Economics Department in 1999 and 2001 respectively. Nathan C. Ricker attended U of I and in 1873 was the first person to graduate in the United States with a degree in Architecture. Mary L. Page, the first woman to obtain a degree in architecture, also graduated from U of I. Disability rights activist and co-organizer of the 504 Sit-in, Kitty Cone, attended during the 1960s, but left 6 hours short of her degree to continue her activism in New York.
  In sports, baseball pitcher Ken Holtzman was a two-time All Star major leaguer, and threw two no-hitters in his career. In sports entertainment, David Otunga became a two-time WWE Tag Team Champion.
  Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) was founded as the national honor society for electrical engineering in 1904.  Maurice LeRoy Carr (B.S. 1905) and Edmund B. Wheeler (B.S. 1905) were part of the founding group of ten students and they served as the first and second national presidents of HKN. The Eta Kappa Nu organization is now the international honor society for IEEE as the IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu (IEEE-HKN). The U of I collegiate chapter is known as 
caption: Monument for the HKN Honor Society which was founded at U of I.
exif: {"Image Make": "LGE", "Image Model": "Nexus 4", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image ExifOffset": "134", "GPS GPSTimeStamp": "[21, 26, 25]", "GPS GPSDate": "2013:04:22", "Image GPSInfo": "328", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/119", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2013:04:22 16:26:25", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2002:12:08 12:00:00", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FocalLength": "23/5", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2303", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2799"}