The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for the IBM Research Division.

The center is on three sites, with the main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York 35 miles north of New York City, two buildings in Hawthorne, New York, and one building in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The research center is named for both Thomas J. Watson Sr and Thomas J. Watson Jr , who led IBM as president and CEO respectively from 1915 (when it was known as CTR) to 1971.

The research is intended to improve hardware (physical sciences and semiconductors research), software (security, programming, mathematics and speech recognition), and services.

The center was founded in 1945 as the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory, on 116th Street in New York, expanding to 115th Street in 1953. The headquarters were moved to Yorktown Heights in 1957, with a new lab designed by architect Eero Saarinen completed in 1961, with the 115th Street site closing in 1970. The lab expanded to Hawthorne in 1984.

Notable staff include the mathemetician Benoît Mandelbrot.

External links

Thomas J. Watson Research Center