New York University

Alumni include heads of state, royalty, eminent scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs, media figures, founders and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and astronauts. As of October 2019, 37 Nobel Laureates, 8 Turing Award winners, 5 Fields Medalists, over 30 Academy Award winners, over 30 Pulitzer Prize winners, and hundreds of members of the National Academies of Sciences and United States Congress have been affiliated as faculty or alumni. Washington Square and Greenwich Village have been hubs of cultural life in New York City since the early 19th century. Much of this culture has intersected with NYU at various points in its history. Artists of the Hudson River School, the United States' first prominent school of painters, settled around Washington Square. Samuel F.B. Morse, a noted artist who also pioneered the telegraph and created the Morse Code, served as the first chair of Painting and Sculpture. He and Daniel Huntington were early tenants of the Old University Building in the mid-19th century. (The University rented out studio space and residential apartments within the "academic" building.) As a result, they had notable interaction with the cultural and academic life of the university.