1966 – 1970

Higher Level Perspective From Physics

by Jeff Kodosky

I decided to attend RPI based on recommendations from people in my neighborhood who worked at Grumman Aircraft. I applied to MIT as well, but didn't get in, which I think was a good thing because the challenge would have been too much. I spent my first semester in the aerospace engineering program, but after that I decided I wanted to better understand how the universe worked and so I switched to physics. I had a professor, Dr. Martin Maley, who recommended I apply to graduate school at University of Texas at Austin. My wife and I decided to move to Texas so I could attend UT and that's where I met two other grad students and started a company. We worked part-time at UT Applied Research Labs while pursuing our graduate studies and starting our company on the side. After about four years, the company was big enough to afford us and we resigned from the lab. Our first product was a board that plugged into a PDP-11 computer, enabling it to connect to various instruments. We continued to expand our hardware and software offerings over the years. When the Apple Macintosh computer was introduced, I invented a graphical programming language, LabVIEW, that used the graphics capability of the machine to design programs and that defined my career from then on. We founded the company in 1976, invented LabVIEW in 1985, went public in 1995, and I retired in 2022. My greatest takeaway from my time at RPI was the perspective I got from my physics education. It enabled me to approach problems in my business and career from a high level, using a top down kind of perspective of getting the main large concepts figured out and approximating the kind of relationships between the parts before getting down to doing detailed computations. This broader, higher level perspective influenced me a lot and was a direct outcome of my physics education.