Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni

Dan Laksov (10 July 1940 – 25 October 2013) was a Norwegian-Swedish mathematician and human rights activist. He was primarily active within the field of algebraic geometry.

Captain George Francis Kosco (1 April 1908 – 11 June 1985) was a United States Navy aerologist and polar explorer.
Kosco was born in Ramsaytown, Pennsylvania, on 1 April 1908. He was a Slovak American: his father had come from Oľšov, and his mother from Plavnica. His family name had been "Kvasnak", but this was changed to "Kosco" when his parents emigrated to the United States. Kosco graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1930, and earned a master's degree in weather aerology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940. His dissertation, co-authored with John O. F. Dorsett, was called Winter weather types of the eastern North Pacific and adjacent coastal and island areas.Kosco spent much of the 1930s hurricane hunting in the Caribbean. In 1939 he married Bernadette Howley (1912–2013); the couple had three children. Bob Drury and Tom Clavin describe him as a "handsome, athletic six-footer", while Buckner F. Melton Jr. calls him "a slightly stout moon-faced officer".Kosco was assigned to Admiral William Halsey Jr.'s Third Fleet in early October 1944. In December, the fleet was struck by Typhoon Cobra, which destroyed three ships. Kosco, aboard the USS New Jersey, reported a "tropical disturbance" 600 miles (970 km) to the east, and moving away from the fleet, when in fact it was a full-blown typhoon 200 miles (320 km) away and coming towards the fleet. Kosco later admitted to a board of inquiry that he had underestimated Cobra's strength, "basing his prediction on historical data about regional storms rather than relying upon current local observations." He was "mildly reprimanded". In 1967, Kosco published an account of the incident coauthored with Hans Christian Adamson: Halsey's Typhoons: A Firsthand Account of How Two Typhoons, More Powerful than the Japanese, Dealt Death and Destruction to Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet.Kosco was present at the signing ceremony of the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri at Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. He took what is believed to be the only color film footage of the ceremony. This was only released publicly in 2010.In 1946 Kosco participated in Operation Nanook in the Arctic. He was then chief aerologist and chief scientist in Operation Highjump in the Antarctic with Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd Jr. in 1946–47. He also led several other polar expeditions, collecting specimens for the Smithsonian Institution. Kosco Glacier in Antarctica was named in his honor in 1962.Kosco retired from the Navy in 1960. He died on 11 June 1985 at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Gerald Stanford "Gerry" Guralnik (; September 17, 1936 – April 26, 2014) was the Chancellor’s Professor of Physics at Brown University. In 1964 he co-discovered the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble (GHK). As part of Physical Review Letters' 50th anniversary celebration, the journal recognized this discovery as one of the milestone papers in PRL history. While widely considered to have authored the most complete of the early papers on the Higgs theory, GHK were controversially not included in the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.In 2010, Guralnik was awarded the American Physical Society's J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics for the "elucidation of the properties of spontaneous symmetry breaking in four-dimensional relativistic gauge theory and of the mechanism for the consistent generation of vector boson masses".Guralnik received his BS degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1958 and his PhD degree from Harvard University in 1964. He went to Imperial College London as a postdoctoral fellow supported by the National Science Foundation and then became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester. In the fall of 1967 Guralnik went to Brown University and frequently visited Imperial College and Los Alamos National Laboratory where he was a staff member from 1985 to 1987. While at Los Alamos, he did extensive work on the development and application of computational methods for lattice QCD.
Guralnik died of a heart attack at age 77 in 2014.

Hernán Jesús Garrido Lecca Montañez (born May 18, 1960) is a Peruvian economist, writer, producer, inventor and politician. A popular children's literature author in Peru, he is most recognized by his work Pirates in Callao, which was adapted into the first CGI motion picture in Peruvian cinematography. At political level, he is a member of the Peruvian Aprista Party, serving in Alan García's second administration as cabinet minister, from 2006 to 2008.Garrido Lecca graduated from the University of the Pacific with a major in economics. Subsequently, he attended Harvard Kennedy School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, obtaining a Master's in Public Administration and a Master's of Science in Technology and Policy, respectively. He attained a PhD in Applied Economics at the University of Seville. His interest in literature led him to complete the master's program in Peruvian and Latin American Literature at the National University of San Marcos. He holds the rank of Major of the Peruvian Army (Reserve), and is a Private Pilot.After working in radio and television journalism in different media for more during the 1990s and publishing books in the fields of economics, science and technology, and consumer advocacy, Garrido Lecca entered politics by running for the Peruvian Congress at the 2001 general election with Union for Peru. Although not elected, he was recruited in the Peruvian Aprista Party as an advisor to former president Alan García. He was subsequently named the party's campaign manager for the 2006 general election.
At the start of the second presidency of Alan García in July 2006, Garrido Lecca was appointed Minister of Housing, Construction and Sanitation. In December 2007, he was rotated in the cabinet as Minister of Health. He resigned on October 14, 2008, amid the 2008 oil scandal, which led Alan García to sack his entire cabinet. Garrido Lecca was signaled as part of the scheme leading to the scandal, and currently remains under investigation alongside other former members of the administration.

Herbert William Ehrgott (October 31, 1904 – September 20, 1982) was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force.

Paul Harold Cootner (May 24, 1930 – April 16, 1978) was a financial economist noted for his book The Random Character of Stock Market Prices.
Cootner was born in Logansport, Indiana. He attended the University of Florida, where he earned bachelor's and master's degree. He received a PhD in industrial economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953.
He worked at Brown University briefly before serving in the Army. He then joined Resources for the Future.
He joined finance faculty of the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1959, where he started work on the "random walk" theory of securities prices, work that led to the 1964 publication of his groundbreaking book.
In 1970, he left MIT to join the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.
He died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1978.

Louis de Branges de Bourcia (born August 21, 1932) is a French-American mathematician. He was the Edward C. Elliott Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, retiring in 2023. He is best known for proving the long-standing Bieberbach conjecture in 1984, now called de Branges's theorem. He claims to have proved several important conjectures in mathematics, including the generalized Riemann hypothesis.
Born to American parents who lived in Paris, de Branges moved to the US in 1941 with his mother and sisters. His native language is French. He did his undergraduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1949–53), and received a PhD in mathematics from Cornell University (1953–57). His advisors were Wolfgang Fuchs and then-future Purdue colleague Harry Pollard. He spent two years (1959–60) at the Institute for Advanced Study and another two (1961–62) at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He was appointed to Purdue in 1962.
An analyst, de Branges has made incursions into real, functional, complex, harmonic (Fourier) and Diophantine analyses. As far as particular techniques and approaches are concerned, he is an expert in spectral and operator theories.

Robert Lewis Letsinger (July 31, 1921 – May 26, 2014) was an American biochemist and was a professor of chemistry at Northwestern University. He was best known for his research and development of chemical synthesis of DNA.

John Henry Holland (February 2, 1929 – August 9, 2015) was an American scientist and professor of psychology and electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a pioneer in what became known as genetic algorithms.

Harold Louis Humes, Jr. (May 11, 1926 – September 10, 1992) was known as HL Humes in his books, and usually as "Doc" Humes in life. He was the originator of The Paris Review literary magazine, author of two novels in the late 1950s, and a gregarious fixture of the cultural scene in Paris, London, and New York in the 1950s and early 1960s.
In 1966, in London, he took large amounts of LSD, which was given to him by Timothy Leary, and he became paranoid and sometimes delusional. After this, he no longer published any writing. When he returned to the US in 1969, he reinvented himself as a "guru on campus", a self-appointed visiting professor, and spent the next 20-odd years living on or near-campus at Columbia University, Princeton University, Bennington College, Monmouth College (now University) and Harvard University, dependent on both his family and on students who were fascinated by his mixture of erudition and mental illness.