<p>Princeton seems to be more of a Computer Science powerhouse these days than Columbia or Harvard.
Look at the NRC/Chronicle CS department rankings.
Princeton now ties with Stanford in a couple of categories. It is either very close to or way ahead of Stanford in the others. (<a href=“NRC Rankings Overview: Computer Sciences”>http://chronicle.com/article/NRC-Rankings-Overview-/124721/</a>)</p>
<p>Brian Kernighan is at Princeton (look him up if you don’t know who he is).
In fact, he’s the undergraduate department rep.
Here is a list of projects and senior theses he has advised:
<a href=“Independent work projects and senior theses”>https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/iw.html</a>
(It’s one thing for a university to employ famous professors; it’s another thing for those professors to teach, let alone work closely on projects, with undergraduate students).</p>
<p>Princeton people developed (or co-developed) the TCP and IP protocols (the comms protocols at the heart of the Internet), the BASIC programming language, the C programming language, and the LISP programming language. Princeton people have been very influential in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Alan Turing got his doctorate from Princeton. 9 computer scientists affiliated with Princeton University have won the prestigious Turing Award (the Nobel Prize of computing). Harvard affiliates have won even more (13), but then, Harvard is a much bigger university. </p>