Early life and academic work
Born September 25, 1956, in Baltimore, Maryland, Danny Hillis spent much of his childhood living overseas, in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received his bachelor of science in mathematics in 1978. As an undergraduate, he worked at the MIT Logo Laboratory under the tutelage of Seymour Papert, developing computer hardware and software for children. During this time, he also designed computer-oriented toys and games for the Milton Bradley Company. While still in college, he co-founded Terrapin Inc., a producer of computer software, including Logo, for elementary schools.
As a graduate student at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Hillis designed tendon-controlled robot arms and a touch-sensitive robot "skin".
During his college years, Hillis was part of the team that built a computer composed entirely of Tinkertoys, currently at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
At MIT, Hillis began to study Artificial Intelligence under Marvin Minsky. In 1981, he proposed building a massively parallel computer for Artificial Intelligence, consisting of a million processors, each similar to a modern Graphics Processing Unit. This work culminated in the design of a massively parallel computer with 64,000 processor cores. He named it the Connection Machine, and it became the topic of his PhD, for which he received the 1985 Association for Computing Machinery Doctoral Dissertation award. Hillis earned his doctorate as a Hertz Foundation Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon and Gerald Sussman, receiving his PhD in 1988. He later served as an adjunct professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he wrote The Pattern on the Stone. Hillis was later appointed Judge Widney Professor of Engineering and Medicine at USC, and a Visiting Professor at MIT. Hillis served on various thesis committees, including PhD committees of Jennifer Groff, Travis Rich, Ariel Ekblaw, and Sunanda Sharma.
