The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research. MIT is one of two private land-grant universities and is also a sea grant and space grant university.

MIT was founded by William Barton Rogers in the year 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States. Although based upon German and French polytechnic models of an institute of technology, MIT's founding philosophy of "learning by doing" made it an early pioneer in the use of laboratory instruction, undergraduate research, and progressive architectural styles. As a federally funded research and development center during World War II, MIT scientists developed defense-related technologies that would later become integral to computers, radar, and inertial guidance. After the war, MIT's reputation expanded beyond its core competencies in science and engineering into the social sciences including economics, linguistics, political science, and management.

MIT's endowment and annual research expenditures are among the largest of any American university. MIT graduates and faculty are noted for their technical acumen (72 affiliated Nobel Laureates, 47 National Medal of Science recipients, and 29 MacArthur Fellows), entrepreneurial spirit (a 1997 report claimed that the aggregated revenues of companies founded by MIT affiliates would make it the twenty-fourth largest economy in the world), and irreverence (the popular practice of constructing elaborate pranks, or hacking, often has anti-authoritarian overtones).