Nathan P. Myhrvold

Former Microsoft CTO and founder of Intellectual Ventures

• Born: August 3, 1959
• Place of Birth: Seattle, Washington

Primary Company/Organization: Microsoft

Introduction

Nathan P. Myhrvold worked for Microsoft for thirteen years as its chief technology officer, founding Microsoft Research, the first major industrial research laboratory in more than a generation. Microsoft Research was instrumental in transforming Microsoft from a software producer with a narrow focus in the 1980s to the giant it has become in the twenty-first century, despite some notable hardware product failures. The single laboratory has since expanded to research initiatives throughout the world. After Microsoft, the former child prodigy started Intellectual Ventures and wrote the Modernist Cuisinecookbook, which has helped to revolutionize twenty-first-century cuisine.

Early Life

Nathan Paul Myhrvold was born in Seattle, Washington, on August 3, 1959. A child prodigy, he attended the then recently formed Mirman School for Gifted Children before enrolling in college at age fourteen. He earned his bachelor of science and master's degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, in mathematics and physics before accepting a Hertz Foundation fellowship for graduate study, enrolling at Princeton University for another master's program (in mathematical economics), followed by his Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics. He was twenty-three when he finished his work at Princeton in 1973. He then spent a year at the University of Cambridge working on physicist Stephen Hawking's team on quantum field theory and gravitation.

After Cambridge, Myhrvold founded Dynamical Systems Research, Inc., a software company producing a multitasking environment for the DOS operating system. When Microsoft bought out the company in 1986, Myrhvold accepted a job with the software giant.

Life's Work

At Microsoft, Myhrvold was chief technology officer and founded Microsoft Research, the company's research division, to explore and develop new ideas in computer science and their applications in Microsoft products. The original Microsoft Research campus was opened in Redmond, Washington, in 1991. In later years, laboratories opened in Cambridge, England (1997), with a close association with the University of Cambridge; Beijing, China (1998); Mountain View, California (2001), which later merged with Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center in San Francisco; Bangalore, India (2005); Cairo, Egypt (2006); Cambridge, Massachusetts (2008); and New York City (2012). Microsoft also started a research and development program in Israel in 1991, which became Microsoft Israel Innovation Labs in 2006. In 2003, the Advanced Technology Center, an independent research and development group, spun off from Microsoft Research Asia.

Microsoft Research was the first major industrial research lab opened in more than a generation. Myhrvold intended it to be comparable to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Bell Laboratories, both of which have accomplished legendary feats in science and technology. Microsoft Research grew from a software company whose major successes were in operating systems and a small number of applications to a giant in the gaming industry as well as other areas.

Myhrvold left Microsoft in 2000 to found Intellectual Ventures, a patent portfolio developer formed as a private partnership by Myrhvold, Intel's Peter Detkin, Microsoft's Edward Jung, and attorney Gregory Gorder. In the next ten years it became one of the top five owners of U.S. patents. The partnership has purchased more than thirty thousand patents or patent applications while developing another several thousand internally. Although not as ambitious as Microsoft Research, the Intellectual Ventures lab, opened in 2009, works on prototypes and developing patents in Intellectual Ventures' portfolio. One of the ideas developed by Intellectual Ventures, promoted on talk show appearances and in the book SuperFreakonomics, is a geoengineering method for reducing the effects of climate change by simulating the effects of a volcanic eruption. A less widely reported but potentially groundbreaking patent, developed internally, is a nuclear reactor that uses uranium waste as fuel.

Intellectual Ventures has faced significant criticism for its balance of purchased patents to internally developed innovations. Because it is a private partnership, it is not clear how much of its revenue comes from developing its patents and how much derives from patent infringement lawsuits, though it has been accused of profiting from litigation and patenting ideas it has no intention of developing so it can sue other companies for infringement later. A December 2010 lawsuit against Check Point, Symantec, Trend Micro, Altera, Lattice, Elpida, Hynix, Microsemi, and McAfee was described by a critic on a radio program as a “shakedown.” Others have characterized Intellectual Ventures' activities as “patent trolling.”

Personal Life

Myhrvold is a prizewinning amateur photographer, barbecue champion, scientist, and chef. His scientific articles have appeared in Nature, Science, and Paleobiology, and he has gone on paleontological expeditions with the Museum of the Rockies. He has donated money both to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project and to the reconstruction of Charles Babbage's difference engine (including a second reconstruction of the difference engine for himself). He and others have developed a portable, actively cooled microscope system used to photograph snowflakes in the field.

Myhrvold's “amateur” work in cuisine could be as significant as his founding of Microsoft Research. A longtime amateur cook, he has participated in championship-winning barbecue teams, studied French cooking, and apprenticed at Seattle restaurant Rover's before turning to molecular gastronomy, or what is increasingly called Modernist Cuisine, which is also the title of his groundbreaking 2011 book. Molecular gastronomy (a term no chef embraced) began in Spain with the work of Ferran Adrià, who used food ingredients such as xanthan gum and methylcellulose, commonly used in the packaged foods industry, in high-end cooking. Characteristic techniques included constructing “caviar” of drops of liquid surrounded by thin membranes, manipulating textures through gels and other additives, and combining ingredients in unexpected ways, such as Adrià's sour cherry surrounded by what appears to be fondant or white chocolate but is actually Iberico ham fat. New equipment was put to use as well: sous-vide water baths were used to transform the texture of meat, PacoJet high-speed blenders allowed any ingredient to be frozen and blended into a sorbet, and vacuum-sealing was used to compress high-water ingredients such as cucumbers and melons to change their textures without cooking them. At the same time, Adrià's cooking was solidly grounded in traditional Spanish cuisine and ingredients, and many of the most successful chefs to follow in his footsteps in the early twenty-first century likewise maintained a proximity to traditional flavors.

Although Adrià had published an exhaustive text on his work at his restaurant El Bulli, English translations were rare, expensive, and increasingly out of date. Myhrvold's book, cowritten with Chris Young and Maxime Bilet from the London restaurant The Fat Duck, serves as an examination of the field, collecting knowledge from disparate sources and presenting it in a six-volume tour de force of more than twenty-four hundred pages. Wayt Gibbs, an Intellectual Ventures employee, served as editor in chief.

Myhrvold went on to publish several more cookbooks, including Modernist Cuisine at Home (2012), with Maxime Bilet;The Photography of Modernist Cuisine (2013), featuring photos taken by Myhrvold and a team of photographers; Modernist Bread (2017) with Francisco Migoya, which won the 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award in the restaurant and professional category; and Food & Drink: Modernist Cuisine Photography in 2023.

Bibliography

Auletta, Ken. The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1998. Print.

Edstrom, Jennifer. Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside; How the World's Richest Corporation Wields Its Power. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. Print.

Johanson, 3ric, Charles Krebs, and Nathan P. Myhrvold. "High-Resolution Photography of Snowflakes with a Field Microscope." Microscopy Today, vol. 29, no. 4, July 2021, pp. 14-20. DOI: 10.1017/S1551929521000882. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Myrhvold, Nathan. "Nathan Myhrvold: Reflections on a Transformational Gift." The Hertz Foundation, 30 Nov. 2022, www.hertzfoundation.org/news/nathan-myhrvold-reflections-on-a-transformational-gift/. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Myrhvold, Nathan, and Maxime Bilet. Modernist Cuisine at Home. Seattle: The Cooking Lab, 2012. Print.

Myrhvold, Nathan, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet. Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. 6 vols. Seattle: The Cooking Lab, 2011. Print.