22 Facts About Nathan Myhrvold

1.

Nathan Myhrvold was born on August 3,1959 in Seattle, Washington to Norwegian American parents.

2.

Nathan Myhrvold was raised in Santa Monica, California, where he attended Mirman School and Santa Monica High School, graduating in 1974, and began college at age 14.

3.

Nathan Myhrvold was awarded a Hertz Foundation Fellowship for graduate study and studied at Princeton University, where he earned a master's degree in mathematical economics and completed a Ph.

4.

Nathan Myhrvold left Cambridge to co-found a computer startup in Oakland, California.

5.

Nathan Myhrvold worked at Microsoft for 13 years in a variety of executive positions, culminating in his appointment as the company's first chief technology officer in 1996.

6.

Nathan Myhrvold has described his goal for Intellectual Ventures as helping to create a market for patent-backed securities.

7.

Nathan Myhrvold has publicly defended his firm's practices, arguing that they foster innovation by serving as a marketplace for intellectual property.

8.

Nathan Myhrvold responds that it has returned more than $500 million to individual inventors and most of the remaining revenues to its investors.

9.

Nathan Myhrvold is vice chairman of TerraPower, a spin-out of Intellectual Ventures that is developing a new kind of nuclear reactor, known as a traveling-wave reactor, that is designed to be safer, cheaper, and cleaner than current nuclear power plants.

10.

Nathan Myhrvold's work has appeared in scientific journals including Science, Nature, Paleobiology, PLOS One, and the Physical Review, as well as in Fortune, Time, Scientific American, National Geographic Traveler, and Slate.

11.

Nathan Myhrvold has contributed $1 million to the nonprofit SETI Institute in Mountain View, CA, for the development of the Allen Telescope Array, which was envisioned to be the most powerful instrument for SETI.

12.

In research presented at scientific conferences and published in the astronomy journal Icarus, Nathan Myhrvold has been a vocal critic of procedures and results about asteroid diameters published by the NEOWISE team.

13.

Nathan Myhrvold is the principal author of a culinary text entitled Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, released in March 2011, on the application of scientific research principles and new techniques and technology to cooking.

14.

Nathan Myhrvold was part of a team that won first place at the world barbecue championships in Memphis.

15.

Nathan Myhrvold has appeared as a guest judge on Top Chef.

16.

Nathan Myhrvold received the James Beard Foundation Award for cookbook of the year in 2012 and an honorary degree from The Culinary Institute of America in 2013 for his book Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking.

17.

In 2010, Nathan Myhrvold was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top 100 global thinkers.

18.

Nathan Myhrvold was selected as the keynote speaker for the UCLA College commencement ceremonies on Friday, June 12,2015 and received the Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences Luminary Award from the UCLA Division of Physical Sciences in 2021.

19.

In 2013, Nathan Myhrvold was a judge for the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.

20.

Nathan Myhrvold received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1996.

21.

Nathan Myhrvold endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election.

22.

Nathan Myhrvold is married to Rosemarie Havranek, whom he met while studying at Princeton.