Bill Gates will share words of wisdom on Sept. 22 at the opening ceremony for a computer science center bearing his name at Carnegie Mellon University, the home of the nation’s first such department in 1965.
The Gates Center for Computer Science, which will be home to undergraduate computer science programs, is funded in large part through a $20 million gift from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Pittsburgh-based center will be part of a complex also including the new Hillman Center for Future-Generation Technologies, which is also being dedicated this month.
The buildings, which include 217,000 square feet of interior space, are built to the latest energy efficiency standards and will serve as central buildings on the 140-acre campus. A footbridge on the fifth floor of the Gates Center will be dedicated in the fall to Randy Pausch, the late CMU computer science professor who gained worldwide notoriety through his inspiring “Last Lecture.”
Gates, of course, is famed for having dropped out of Harvard University, though he did pick up an honorary degree and deliver a commencement speech at the Cambridge, Mass., institution in 2007.
Earlier this summer, Gates made headlines for his generosity by joining with Microsoft Research on a new website featuring the physics lectures of Richard Feynman, as presented at Cornell University in 1964.
