Harry R. Lewis

Harry Roy Lewis (born 1947) is an American computer scientist, mathe­ma­ti­cian, and uni­ver­sity admin­i­stra­tor known for his research in com­pu­ta­tional logic, textbooks in theoretical computer science, and writings on computing, higher education, and technology. He is Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, and was Dean of Harvard College from 1995 to 2003.

Essentially all of Lewis's career has been at Harvard, where he has been honored for his "particularly distinguished contributions to undergraduate teaching"; his students have included future entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and numerous future faculty members at Harvard and other schools. The website "Six Degrees to Harry Lewis", created by Zuckerberg while at Harvard, was a precursor to Facebook.

Lewis was born in Boston and grew up in Wellesley, Massa­chu­setts. His parents were physicians – his father a hospital chief of anesthesiology and his mother the head of the Dever State School for intel­lec­tu­ally disabled children. His father was a World War II veteran and the son of a German Lutheran father and a Russian Jewish mother. After graduating summa cum laude at the end of the eleventh grade at Boston's Roxbury Latin School he entered Harvard College, where he was for a time a third-string lacrosse goalie.

Lewis has said that he discovered "I wasn't a real math­e­ma­ti­cian [once] I got out of the amateur leagues of high school mathematics", but was "tremendously excited" by the computer-science research oppor­tu­nities at Harvard. As a senior he lectured a graduate class using a computer-graphics program, SHAPE­SHIFTER, which he had developed for displaying complex-plane trans­for­ma­tions on a cathode ray tube. 

SHAPE­SHIFTER automatically recognized formulas and commands hand-entered via a stylus on a RAND tablet, and could be "trained" to recognize the handwriting of individual users. There being no degree program in computer science per se at Harvard at the time, in 1968 Lewis received his BA (summa, Quincy House) in applied mathematics and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

After serving for two years in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps as a commissioned officer in the role of mathematician and computer scientist for the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, he spent a year in Europe as a Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellow. He then returned to Harvard, where he earned his M.A. in 1973 and PhD in 1974, after which he was immediately appointed Assistant Professor of Computer Science. He became an Associate Professor in 1978, and Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in 1981.

Lewis formally retired in 2020, but continues to teach as Gordon McKay Research Professor in Computer Science. His wife Marlyn McGrath retired in 2021 after 42 years as Harvard College's director of admissions. The Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath Professorship of Engineering and Applied Sciences was endowed by one of Lewis's former students in 2012.