Nathan Myhrvold (born 1959 in Seattle, Washington), formerly Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, is co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, which is seeking to build a large invention portfolio. He personally holds more than 18 U.S. patents and has applied for more than 100. His company is accumulating patents in software.^[1][2]

Myhrvold attended Mirman School ^[3]. He began college at age 14.^[4] He studied mathematics, geophysics, and space physics at UCLA (BSc, Masters). At Princeton he earned a master's degree in mathematical economics and completed a PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics by age 23. He also attended Santa Monica College. For one year, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge working under Stephen Hawking, studying cosmology, quantum field theory in curved space time and quantum theories of gravitation, but left to join a computer startup in Oakland, California. The company, Dynamical Systems Inc., sought to produce a clone of IBM's TopView graphical user interface. Microsoft purchased Dynamical Systems in 1986 and Myhrvold worked there for 13 years. At Microsoft he founded Microsoft Research in 1991. ^[5]

Myhrvold is a prize-winning nature and wildlife photographer. He is also involved with paleontological research on expeditions with the Museum of the Rockies. His work has appeared in scientific journals including Science, Nature, Paleobiology and the Physical Review, as well as Fortune, Time, National Geographic Traveler and Slate. He has contributed $1 million to the SETI Foundation for the development of the Allen Telescope Array, planned to be the world's most powerful radio telescope.

In addition to his business and scientific interests, he is a master French chef who has finished first and second in the world championship of barbecue in Memphis, Tennessee. He also works as an assistant chef at one of Seattle's leading French restaurants. ^[6]

After the Science Museum in London successfully built the computing section of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine #2 in 1991, Myhrvold funded the construction of the output section, which performs both printing and stereotyping of calculated results. He also commissioned the construction of a second complete Difference Engine #2 for himself, which will be exhibited at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California from May 10 2008 through April 2009. ^[7]

References

Further reading

• Auletta, Ken, "The Highwaymen", Harvest Books, 1998. ISBN 0156005735 ? cf Chapter 17: The Microsoft Provocateur: Nathan Myhrvold, Bill Gates Corporate Gadfly.

External links

• Biography from Intellectual Ventures
• Who's afraid of Nathan Myhrvold?, Fortune, July 10, 2006
• In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?, Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, May 12, 2008
• TED talk (embedded video): Nathan Myhrvold: A life of fascinations

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