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IBM Professor of Technology and Information Systems, UCLA Anderson School

Martin Greenberger occupies the IBM chair in computers and information systems at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. He is also senior fellow at the Milken Institute and president of Council for Technology and the Individual, a nonprofit foundation dealing with the human dimensions of technology. In this latter capacity, he has conducted ten annual roundtables for leaders in the digital field.

Greenberger received A.B. (summa cum laude), A.M., and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics from Harvard University, working there in the early 1950s with Mark I, a pre-ENIAC digital computer. His doctoral dissertation was a microanalytic simulation of the American economy. During the same period, he managed the IBM research group that tracked the Russian Sputnik, a collaboration with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Harvard.

Later, while on the faculty of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Greenberger organized the MIT Centennial Symposia on Management and the Computer of the Future, a yearlong series involving such notables as Vannevar Bush, Claude Shannon, Herbert Simon, C.P. Snow, and Norbert Wiener. Later, he joined with others to form Project MAC, leading a group there in timesharing and networking research. Project MAC led to the ARPANET, which evolved into the Internet.

In a 1964 Atlantic Monthly article on “Computers of Tomorrow,” Greenberger introduced the term “information utility” to express a vision of scalable computation, automatic security markets, on-line communities, distributed information services, money cards, and computerized financial transactions. A lively commentary on the article recalling Vannevar Bush appears in the Atlantic Archives at http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/tech.htm

Before coming to UCLA, Greenberger served at The Johns Hopkins University as chairman of the Ph.D. program in computer science, director of information processing, and professor of mathematical sciences. He has been a visiting professor at The Technion in Israel, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and the MIT Media Lab.

Education and degrees: A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, Harvard University
Home and family: Santa Monica, California (three daughters, two sons, two grandsons)
SU Track: Finance and Entrepreneurship
Email: martin.greenberger@singularityu.org