内森·梅尔沃德

Nathan Paul Myhrvold (born August 3, 1959) is an American inventor, scientist, and businessman, former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, co-founder of Intellectual Ventures and TerraPower, and the principal author of Modernist Cuisine and its successor books.

Early life and education

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

Transferring from Santa Monica College, he studied mathematics (B.Sc.), and geophysics and space physics (Master's) at UCLA. He 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.D. in applied mathematics after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "Vistas in curved space-time quantum field theory" under the supervision of Malcolm Perry. For one year, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge working under Stephen Hawking.

Career

Early career

Myhrvold left Cambridge to co-found a computer startup in Oakland, California. The company, Dynamical Systems Research Inc., sought to produce Mondrian, a clone of IBM's TopView multitasking environment for DOS. Myhrvold served as Dynamical Systems Research's president. Microsoft purchased Dynamical Systems Research in 1986 for $1.5M in stock. 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. At Microsoft he founded Microsoft Research in 1991.

Intellectual Ventures

After Microsoft, in 2000 Myhrvold co-founded Intellectual Ventures, a patent portfolio developer and broker in the areas of technology and energy, which has acquired over 30,000 patents. Intellectual Ventures takes part in the market for inventions and patents, buying patents from companies and inventors under the assumption the patents will be more valuable in the future. Intellectual Ventures has also been granted thousands of patents on inventions conceived on-site by its own teams, which include a number of individuals on the list of prolific inventors. Myhrvold is named as an inventor on more than 900 U.S. patents.

Startup companies spun out of Intellectual Ventures, including TerraPower, Kymeta, Echodyne, Modern Hydrogen, Lumotive, Evolv Technology, and Pivotal Commware, have developed commercial products from Intellectual Ventures' inventions. Through its Global Good unit, which Myhrvold founded in collaboration with Bill Gates, Intellectual Ventures has also invented and produced commercial products, such as improved vaccine coolers and milking cans, aimed at low-income markets in Africa and Asia. However, in most cases, Intellectual Ventures' inventions are limited to the descriptions provided in their patents, which are bundled into portfolios for licensing.

Myhrvold has described his goal for Intellectual Ventures as helping to create a market for patent-backed securities. The company's business practices have caused controversy, however, with some deprecating the firm as a patent troll, accusing the company of stifling innovation by buying patents and then forcing inventors to license their ideas by means of litigation. Myhrvold has publicly defended his firm's practices, arguing that they foster innovation by serving as a marketplace for intellectual property. He has noted that many of the largest companies in Silicon Valley, including Google, Apple, and Facebook, have also bought large patent portfolios and used litigation to protect them, but he has criticized them as focusing too much on creating "tools or toys for rich people." Walt Mossberg interviewed Myhrvold about Intellectual Ventures' role as a "patent troll" during the 10th annual All Things Digital conference.

According to The New York Times, Intellectual Ventures at one point controlled nearly 70,000 intellectual property assets (patents and patents pending) that it has used to generate approximately $3 billion in revenues, primarily in the form of license fees from large corporations. The company responds that it has returned more than $500 million to individual inventors and most of the remaining revenues to its investors.

Nuclear power

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. In 2020, the company launched a joint venture with GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy to build and operate a prototype reactor of this kind that combines a sodium-cooled fast reactor with a molten salt energy storage system. In 2024, TerraPower broke ground at a site in Wyoming where it intends to build its first reactor.

Science

In addition to his business activities, Myhrvold is a working scientist who has published original, peer-reviewed research in the fields of paleobiology, climate science, and astronomy. A prize-winning nature and wildlife photographer, he has published highly detailed color images of snowflakes and a book of landscape photography titled Natural Wonders: Marvels of Our World. He has also been involved with paleontological research on expeditions with the Museum of the Rockies. His 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. He and Peter Rinearson helped Bill Gates write The Road Ahead, a book about the future that reached No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list in 1995 and 1996. Myhrvold has contributed $1 million to the nonprofit SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, for the development of the Allen Telescope Array, which was envisioned to be the most powerful instrument for SETI.