From alumnus Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, and Irma Wyman, the first woman to be chief information officer at Honeywell, to the creation and impact of Google, the University of Michigan and its graduates have forever altered the sharing of knowledge through technology. Shannon’s work in the 1930s was essential to U-M establishing one of the world’s first computer science programs in 1956. Michigan engineers in 1988 built a computing backbone to connect and support thousands of researchers across the country – an achievement essential to the birth of the internet. U-M was the first public university to leverage the internet by partnering with Google to digitize the University Library’s collection of nearly 7 million volumes, revolutionizing the sharing of knowledge and democratizing access to information. Google itself is the brainchild of engineering alumnus Larry Page, who co-created the search engine with Sergey Brin. 
— Photo and text are presented at the U-M Bicentennial website