Talk:Patrick Joseph McGovern

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Patrick Joseph. McGovern, Jr. (b. 1939) is the chairman and founder of International Data Group (IDG), a company that includes subsidiaries in technology publishing, research and event management. He is a trustee of MIT, and on the Forbes list of the richest people in the United States, where he was ranked 106th in 2004, with a net worth of $2 billion.

Forbes Magazine claims he earned a scholarship by designing an unbeatable tic-tac-toe program (now a trivial programming task, but no mean feat in the 1950s). He worked at the MIT Student Newspaper, The MIT Tech on the features staff during his sophomore year. He has been observed to have a photographic memory and apparently demonstrated it while an undergraduate, according to people who knew him at MIT.

McGovern received a degree in biophysics from MIT in 1959. He started IDG in 1964, then founded the weekly newspaper Computerworld in 1967. He is currently associated with the Whitehead Institute.

He has been divorced once, has four children, and lives in Hollis, N.H. He and his second wife Lore Harp gave MIT $350 million to found the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Links

[Official Biography]

[Forbes 400 Listing]

[MIT announcement of the McGovern Institute]