The man who didn't know what success his invention called the World Wide Web would have has received a prestigious, no-strings-attached award he didn't even know existed.
Tim Berners-Lee was named Monday as one of 29 recipients of the annual "genius grants" and will receive US$270,000 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which hailed him for pioneering "a revolutionary communications system requiring minimal technical understanding."
"I didn't even know about the program or what the MacArthur Foundation was," said the 43-year-old Berners-Lee, who proposed the system that would become the Web while working at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, in the 1970s.
In addition to proposing the initial idea for the Web, he designed specifications for hyper-text markup language (HTML), the uniform resource locator (URL), the hyper-text transfer protocol (HTTP), and established the first Web server on the Internet.
"I didn't know it was going to succeed the way it has," said Berners-Lee, a native of London, Berners-Lee is director of the World Wide Web Consortium and a principal research scientist at the Laboratory for Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The other winners include:
Ida Applebroog, 68, of New York; a painter known for incorporating social criticism and awareness of everyday life into her works. $375,000.
Ishmael Reed, 60, of Oakland, California; innovative black novelist, poet, and essayist. $355,000.
Linda Bierds, 53, of Bainbridge Island, Washington; poet. $320,000.
Elinor Ochs, 53, of Pacific Palisades, California; linguistic anthropologist. $320,000.
Mike Davis, 52, of Pasadena, California; historian. $315,000.
Charles Johnson, 50, of Seattle, Washington; novelist, cartoonist, and screenwriter. $305,000.
Stewart Kwoh, 49, of Los Angeles; attorney and human rights activist for Asians and Pacific Islanders. $300,000.
Edward Hirsch, 48, of Houston; poet and essayist. $295,000.
Leonard Zeskind, 48, of Kansas City, Missouri; researcher and expert on white supremacist groups. $295,000.
Bernadette Brooten, 47, of Cambridge, Massachusetts; professor of religion. $290,000.
Gary Hill, 47, of Seattle; video artist. $290,000.
William McDonald, 46, of Douglas, Arizona; cattle rancher who has forged cooperation among ranchers, conservationists, and government. $285,000.
Nancy Folbre, 45, of Montague, Massachusetts; economist and expert on non-market production. $280,000.
Ellen Barry, 44, of Oakland, California; director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. $275,000.
Charles Lewis, 44, of Alexandria, Virginia; investigative journalist and founder of the Center for Public Integrity. $275,000.
Benjamin Santer, 43, of Livermore, California; atmospheric scientist and authority on global warming. $270,000.
Avner Greif, 42, of Stanford, California; economist. $265,000.
Ayesha Jalal, 42, of New York; historian of the culture of India and Pakistan. $265,000.
John Carlstrom, 41, of Chicago; experimental astrophysicist. $260,000.
Dorothy Q. Thomas, 38, of New York; international women's rights activist. $245,000.
Leah Krubitzer, 37, of Davis, California; neuroscientist. $240,000.
Rebecca Nelson, 37, of Lima, Peru; plant pathologist. $240,000.
Mary Zimmerman, 37, of Evanston, Illinois; innovative playwright and director. $240,000.
Don Mitchell, 36, of Syracuse, New York; cultural geographer. $235,000.
Karl Sims, 36, Cambridge, Massachusetts; computer scientist. $235,000.
Kun-Liang Guan, 35, of Ann Arbor, Michigan; biochemist. $230,000.
Janine Antoni, 34, of New York; sculptor and conceptual artist. $225,000.
Peter Miller, 33, of Berlin; scholar of early modern European intellectual history. $220,000.
The Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation hands out the unrestricted awards to individuals it feels have demonstrated genius and creativity to society's benefit, and makes it cash awards based on the recipient's age. The latest awards brought to $156 million the amount of money awarded since the program began in 1981. There have been 531 winners ranging in age from 18 to 82.
Individuals may not apply for the grants. The foundation instead invites about 100 people each year to serve as "talent scouts."
