Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or RPI, is a large university in Troy, New York, near Albany, founded in 1824 by Stephen Van Rensselaer. It is one of the oldest technical institutions in the United States.
It has five schools: Architecture, Engineering, Humanities & Social Sciences, Management, and Science. The Information Technology department, originally an independant, multidisciplinary department, has since been merged into the School of Science. RPI is a technology-oriented university; all of the residence hall rooms have hard-wired high speed internet access, and students can be found in the computer labs late in the night. The current President of RPI is Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson. RPI also had the United States' first on-campus high-tech business incubator. Leik Myrabo is perhaps the institute's most notable current professor.
The school features a competitive Division I ice hockey team, the Engineers, who won NCAA national titles in 1954 and 1985. The team plays a significant role in the campus' culture, drawing thousands of fans each week during the season. The team's popularity even sparked the tradition of the "hockey line", where students line up for season tickets months in advance of the on-sale date. The official nickname of the school's other Divison III teams was changed in 1995 from the Engineers to the Red Hawks. RPI's unofficial mascot is the .
Notable alumni
- Dr. Allen B. Dumont (1924), perfected the cathode ray tube and is considered the "father of modern TV"
- Bobby Farrelly, famous director, writer and producer of such films as "Shallow Hal" and "There's Something About Mary"
- George W. G. Ferris (1881), inventor of the Ferris Wheel
- Marcian Hoff (1958), the "father of the microprocessor"
- George Low, manager at National Aeronautics and Space Administration for the Apollo 11 project that put the first person on the moon
- Sheldon Roberts, member of the Traitorous Eight that created Silicon Valley
- Washington Roebling (1857), the chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge
- Paul Severino, founder of Wellfleet Communications, which merged with SynOptics Communications to become Bay Networks, now owned by Nortel
- Raymond Tomlinson, invented network electronic mail and put the @ sign in e-mail
