Miller Puckette is known as the creator of Max and Pure Data. As an MIT undergraduate he won the Putnam mathematics competition in 1979, but finished his PhD at Harvard in 1986. He was a researcher at the MIT Media Lab from its inception until 1986, then at IRCAM, and is now professor of music at the University of California, San Diego. He has been a visiting professor at Columbia University and the Technical University of Berlin, and has received two honorary degrees and the SEAMUS award.