Alexander Wissner-Gross

Alexander D. Wissner-Gross is an American research scientist and entrepreneur. He earned S.B. degrees in physics, electrical engineering, and mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—the last student to triple-major before the option was discontinued—and completed a Ph.D. in physics at Harvard University in 2007, where he is a fellow at the Institute for Applied Computational Science. His work has spanned applied technology and theoretical physics. In 2007, he founded CO2Stats, a Y Combinator-funded company that measured the carbon dioxide emissions associated with website usage, and attracted public attention during a dispute over the carbon cost of a Google search. His most widely discussed research, published in Physical Review Letters in 2013 with collaborator Cameron Freer, proposed a physical link between intelligent behaviour and entropy, arguing that systems driven to maximise their future freedom of action can produce apparently goal-directed behaviour without explicit objectives. The paper drew both popular interest and criticism.

Education

As a teenager, Wissner-Gross researched the physics of granular materials such as sand, exploring whether similar principles could be applied at very small scales. He proposed that ideas derived from the behaviour of granular materials might offer an approach to manipulating and assembling nanoscale components, a line of thinking connected to nanotechnology and microscopic manufacturing.

Wissner-Gross earned S.B. degrees in physics, electrical engineering, and mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003. He went on to doctoral study in physics at Harvard, where in 2004 he received a Hertz Foundation fellowship for graduate study in the physical sciences.