Category:Famous Columbia Alumni
Columbia University sits in Morningside Heights in upper Manhattan, and the single most distinctive thing about the people gathered here is that a working school of investing was taught inside it. Benjamin Graham and David Dodd wrote Security Analysis out of Columbia Business School lectures in 1934, and the roster below carries the students and inheritors of that method alongside the university's other two long lines: the founding-era statesmen who passed through King's College, and a modern run of laboratory science that reaches the Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine.
Background
Columbia was chartered in 1754 as King's College, closed during the British occupation of Manhattan, and reconstituted under its present name in 1784. It moved to the Morningside Heights campus in 1897. Like other older American universities it is a group of schools rather than one body, and membership here can come from Columbia College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Law School, the Business School, the Journalism School, the medical faculty, or the School of International and Public Affairs.
Two features of the location shape the membership. Columbia is the only Ivy League university inside New York City, which pulls its graduates into Wall Street, the New York bar and the New York press at rates no rural campus matches. It has also long admitted students who did not finish, and some of the most prominent members here left without a degree.
The Graham and Dodd line
Benjamin Graham taught security analysis at Columbia while working on Wall Street. David Dodd, then a junior instructor, transcribed his lectures, and the two published the resulting book in 1934. Warren Buffett studied under Graham at Columbia and built Berkshire Hathaway on the method. Li Lu, who survived the 1976 Tangshan earthquake as an infant and became a student leader in China before emigrating, chairs Himalaya Capital and belongs to the same tradition. Mario Gabelli developed his own variant of the approach at GAMCO Investors over five decades.
The wider finance block extends past value investing. Henry Kravis and Jerome Kohlberg Jr. both appear here, two of the three founders of KKR and of the leveraged buyout industry that followed. Daniel Loeb runs Third Point. Louis Bacon and Jonathan Lavine came out of macro trading and Bain Capital respectively. Ben Horowitz and Chris Dixon moved the lineage into venture capital and cryptocurrency at Andreessen Horowitz. Alan Greenspan took his doctorate at Columbia before chairing the Federal Reserve, and Robert C. Merton, Milton Friedman, Kenneth Arrow, William Vickrey, Robert Fogel and Alvin Roth supply the academic economics that runs beneath it.
Founders, the Court and heads of state
Alexander Hamilton enrolled at King's College in 1773 and left to join the Revolution, later becoming the first Secretary of the Treasury. John Jay was the first Chief Justice of the United States and the second Governor of New York. Franklin D. Roosevelt belongs to the same line, four elections and twelve years of the presidency later.
The judicial thread is long and continuous. Harlan Fiske Stone served as Dean of Columbia Law School and as Attorney General under Coolidge before joining the Supreme Court in 1925 and becoming Chief Justice in 1941. Charles Evans Hughes held the rare combination of Governor of New York, Associate Justice, Secretary of State and then Chief Justice, resigning from the Court in 1916 to run for president. William O. Douglas served thirty-six years, the longest tenure in the Court's history. Benjamin N. Cardozo, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman and first Jewish woman on the Court, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Blatchford complete the group.
Heads of government abroad form a distinct sub-cluster that separates Columbia from most American universities in this wiki. Justin Trudeau was Prime Minister of Canada from 2015 to 2025. Mauricio Macri was President of Argentina from 2015 to 2019. Keiko Fujimori has been a central figure in Peruvian politics for three decades. Domestic public law is represented by Eric Holder, Michael Mukasey, William Barr, Preet Bharara, Letitia James and Kris Mayes, and the congressional and gubernatorial side by Shirley Chisholm, Thomas E. Dewey, David Paterson, Rosa DeLauro, Elissa Slotkin and Steve Bullock.
The laboratories and the writers
Columbia's science membership is built on its medical and graduate faculties. Richard Axel worked out how mammals detect and discriminate odors. David Julius shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the receptors behind temperature and touch. Robert Lefkowitz mapped G protein-coupled receptors, Louis Ignarro the signalling role of nitric oxide, and Louis Brus discovered the colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals now called quantum dots. In physics Julian Schwinger shaped quantum electrodynamics and Martin Perl discovered the tau lepton. Robert H. Grubbs and William S. Knowles extend the record into catalysis, and Jesse Douglas solved Plateau's problem in mathematics.
The writing side is smaller but sharply defined. Orhan Pamuk received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Turkish citizen to be awarded a Nobel. Louise Gluck published twelve poetry collections. Neil deGrasse Tyson, a graduate of Columbia as well as Harvard and Texas, has run the Hayden Planetarium since 1996. Kara Swisher, Franklin Foer, Linette Lopez and Mohamed Fahmy carry the journalism-school connection into technology reporting, magazine editing and foreign correspondence.
See also
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