William Daniel "Danny" Hillis (born September 25, 1956) is an American inventor, engineer, mathematician, entrepreneur, and author. He co-founded
Thinking Machines Corporation, a company that developed the
Connection Machine, a
parallel supercomputer designed by Hillis at
MIT. He is also co-founder of the
Long Now Foundation,
Applied Minds,
Metaweb Technologies, Applied Proteomics, and author of
The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. He is Judge Widney Professor of Engineering and Medicine at the University of Southern California.