handle multimedia webpages. The university also houses the Charles Babbage Institute, a research and archive center specializing in computer history. The department has strong roots in the early days of supercomputing with Seymour Cray of Cray supercomputers.
The university also became a member of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2007 and has led data analysis projects searching for gravitational waves — their existence was confirmed by scientists in February 2016.
Discoveries and innovation by faculty or alumni include:
Puffed rice – Alexander P. Anderson performed work leading to the discovery of "puffed rice", a starting point for a new breakfast cereal later advertised as "Food Shot From Guns".
Transistorized cardiac pacemaker – Earl Bakken founded Medtronic, where he developed the first external, battery-operated, transistorized, wearable artificial pacemaker in 1957.
Green Revolution – Norman Borlaug was an agronomist who led initiatives worldwide that contributed to extensive …
