Alex Wissner-Gross

Alexander D. Wissner-Gross is an American research scientist and entrepreneur. He earned S.B. degrees in physics, electrical engineering, and mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—the last student to triple-major before the option was discontinued—and completed a Ph.D. in physics at Harvard University in 2007, where he is a fellow at the Institute for Applied Computational Science. His work has spanned applied technology and theoretical physics. In 2007, he founded CO2Stats, a Y Combinator-funded company that measured the carbon dioxide emissions associated with website usage, and attracted public attention during a dispute over the carbon cost of a Google search. His most widely discussed research, published in Physical Review Letters in 2013 with collaborator Cameron Freer, proposed a physical link between intelligent behaviour and entropy, arguing that systems driven to maximise their future freedom of action can produce apparently goal-directed behaviour without explicit objectives. The paper drew both popular interest and criticism.