California Institute of Technology

1957) while a grad student at Caltech participated in the National Geographic Society-Palomar Sky Survey. This ultimately resulted in the publication of the Abell Catalogue of Clusters of Galaxies, the definitive work in the field.
Undergraduate alumni founded, or co-founded, companies such as LCD manufacturer Varitronix, Hotmail, Compaq, MathWorks (which created Matlab), and database provider Imply, while graduate students founded, or co-founded, companies such as Intel, TRW, and the non-profit educational organization, the Exploratorium.
Arnold Beckman (PhD 1928) invented the pH meter and commercialized it with the founding of Beckman Instruments. His success with that company enabled him to provide seed funding for William Shockley (BS 1932), who had co-invented semiconductor transistors and wanted to commercialize them. Shockley became the founding Director of the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory division of Beckman Instruments. Shockley had previously worked at Bell Labs, whose first president was another …