Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. William Barton Rogers founded MIT to accelerate American industrialization through scientific knowledge, and the charter he proposed was signed by the governor of Massachusetts on April 10, 1861. Initially funded by a federal land grant, the institute adopted a German polytechnic model emphasizing laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering, and moved from Boston's Back Bay to its current campus in Cambridge in 1916. Its transformation as a research enterprise began during World War II, when projects like the Radiation Laboratory made it the nation's largest non-industrial research and development contractor, and in the late twentieth century it became closely associated with computer science, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and open-source software development.