The University of Illinois
Not a hugely famous global university like Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT, Princeton, Caltech, Duke, Brown, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Cornell, UCLA and Georgetown but one with an enormous reputation in computer science.
In Bill Gates' February 24, 2004, talk as part of his Five Campus Tour (Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Carnegie-Mellon and Illinois)[114] titled "Software Breakthroughs: Solving the Toughest Problems in Computer Science," he mentioned Microsoft hires more graduates from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign than from any other university in the world.[115] Alumnus William M. Holt, a senior vice-president of Intel, also mentioned in a campus talk on September 27, 2007, entitled "R&D to Deliver Practical Results: Extending Moore's Law"[116] that Intel hires more PhD graduates from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign than from any other university in the country.
In 2007, the university-hosted research Institute for Condensed Matter Theory (ICMT) was launched, with the director Paul Goldbart and the chief scientist Anthony Leggett. ICMT is currently located at the Engineering Science Building on campus.
UIUC alumni and faculty have founded numerous companies and organizations, some of which are shown below.[131][132][133]
Andreessen Horowitz, 2009, co-founder Marc Andreessen (BS)
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), 1969, co-founder Jerry Sanders (BS)
Arizona Diamondbacks, 1995, founder, Jerry Colangelo (BA)
Beckman Coulter, 1935, founder Arnold Orville Beckman (BS, MS)
BET, 1980, co-founder Robert L. Johnson (BA)
Chicago Bears, 1920, founder George Halas
Girls Who Code, 2012, founder Reshma Saujani (BA)
Harlem Globetrotters, 1926, founder Abe Saperstein
National Football League, 1920, co-founder George Halas
Mozilla Corporation, 2005, co-founder Brendan Eich (BS)
Netscape, 1994, co-founder Marc Andreessen (BS)
Oracle, 1977, co-founders Larry Ellison (dropout) and Bob Miner (BS)
Palantir Technologies, 2003, co-founder Nathan Gettings (BS)
PayPal (Confinity), 1998, co-founders Luke Nosek (BS) and Max Levchin (BS)
Playboy Enterprises, 1953, founder Hugh Hefner (BA)
Siebel Systems, 1993, co-founder Thomas Siebel (BA, MS, MBA)
Tesla, 2003, co-founder Martin Eberhard (BS, MS)
W. W. Grainger, 1927, founder William Wallace Grainger (BS)
Wolfram Research, 1987, co-founders Stephen Wolfram and Theodore Gray (BS)
Yelp, 2004, co-founders Jeremy Stoppelman (BS) and Russel Simmons (BS)
YouTube, 2005, co-founders Steve Chen (BS) and Jawed Karim (BS)
Wolfram
“The project is totally in character for Wolfram, whose career includes a MacArthur Foundation fellowship—also known as a “Genius Grant”—at age 21.
He is also known for his immodesty. “Physics hasn't had something dramatic happen in a long time,” he says, though he does concede that the detection of gravitational waves was kind of a moment. “Sciences go through cycles that can last often more than a human life span when it's kind of just incremental, and then suddenly something exciting happens. I'm pretty hopeful that, at a purely technical level, what we've done will reenergize theoretical physics, which is in something of a rut right now.”
from
https://www.wired.com/story/stephen-wolfram-invites-you-to-solve-physics/