Harry R. Lewis

Who is Harry R. Lewis?

Harry Roy Lewis is a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Computer Science at Harvard University. He is also a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. He is in addition the author of several books, including Excellence Without A Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education, and is a co-author of Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion, a work that explores the origins and public consequences of the explosion in recent years of digital information. He was the Dean of Harvard College from 1995 to 2003. He is a Visitor of Ralston College and a Life Trustee of the Roxbury Latin School. He blogs regularly at http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/ and his old blog may still be found on-line at http://www.bitsbook.com/blog/

Harry Lewis was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard in Applied Mathematics — Bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1968, Master's degree in 1973 and his PhD in 1974. His PhD thesis, supervised by Burton Dreben, was titled "Herbrand Expansions and Reductions of the Decision Problem." He has been a member of the Harvard faculty since 1974. Among his students were the young Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, whose website "Six Degrees to Harry Lewis" was a precursor to Facebook.