In honor of America’s 250th birthday, the U.S. Postal Service announced a new series of commemorative stamps, celebrating American icons from Mister Rogers to Barbie to Alexander Hamilton.

Even Ralph Lauren got in on the action. Conspicuously missing, though?

USC Trojans.

So, in honor of America’s semiquincentennial — and the recent naming of the USC Stevens School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, a new school inside the USC Viterbi School of Engineering — we created our own commemorative stamp series, celebrating some of the USC faculty, alumni, and researchers whose work helped build the modern computing world.

Jon Postel
Research scientist, USC Information Sciences Institute (1977-1998)
Known as the “god of the Internet,” Postel managed the global assignment of internet addresses and domain names for nearly three decades from USC’s Information Sciences Institute, almost single-handedly keeping the early internet organized as it grew from a few dozen computers into a global network. He also edited the “Request for Comments” series, the technical documents that still define how the internet works today.

Maja Matarić
Chan Soon-Shiong Chair and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience and Pediatrics
The founding director of the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center, Matarić pioneered the field of socially assistive robotics — robots that help people through encouragement and social interaction rather than physical contact. Her work has supported children with autism, stroke survivors, and people recovering from illness.

William Pratt (M.S. ’61, Ph.D. ’65)
Professor of electrical engineering; founder, USC Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI)
Pratt discovered the transform coding concept that became the mathematical foundation for the JPEG and MPEG standards. His work made it possible to compress and share digital images and video efficiently — the technology underneath every photo you’ve ever posted online.

A.C. “Mike” Markkula (B.S. ’64, M.S. ’66)
Co-founder, Apple Computer
Markkula was Apple’s original investor, writing the company’s original business and marketing plans and providing the early “adult supervision” that turned a garage project into a Fortune 500 company faster than any company in modern history. He later served as Apple’s chairman and CEO during some of its most formative years.

Eve Schooler
Research scientist, USC Information Sciences Institute (1988-1995)
Schooler co-authored the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the standard that still establishes and manages voice and video calls across the internet today. Her early multimedia conferencing research over the experimental “MBone” network laid the groundwork for modern video calling, from Zoom to FaceTime.

Andrew Viterbi (Ph.D. ’62)
Co-founder, Qualcomm; USC trustee; Presidential Chair Professor, USC Presidential Chair and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Inventor of the Viterbi Algorithm, a decoding method now embedded in nearly every cell phone, satellite, and wireless network on Earth. He went on to co-found Qualcomm, building it into one of the most influential companies in modern telecommunications.

George Bekey (USC Viterbi faculty 1962–2002)
Professor of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering
Bekey helped create the “Phony Pony,” the world’s first four-legged walking robot, and co-developed the first five-fingered humanoid robotic hand capable of a true handshake. Over his 40-year USC career, he helped launch robotics as a field of study at the university and mentored generations of engineers who went on to lead the discipline themselves.

Leonard Adleman
Henry Salvatori Chair and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science
Adleman co-invented the RSA encryption algorithm, the math that still secures online banking and much of the modern internet, for which he won the 2002 Turing Award. He later founded an entirely new scientific field, DNA computing, by proving that strands of actual DNA could be used to solve computational problems.

Paul Debevec
Adjunct Research Professor of Computer Science; former Chief Visual Officer, USC Institute for Creative Technologies
Debevec led the invention of the Light Stage, a device that captures how light interacts with an actor’s face to create photorealistic digital doubles. The technology has been used in films from “Avatar” to “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” earning him a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award.

Solomon “Sol” Golomb (USC faculty 1963–2016)
University Professor, Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Mathematics
Golomb’s work on shift register sequences became the foundational math behind GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and modern spread-spectrum communications. He also invented and named “polyominoes,” the geometric puzzle pieces that directly inspired the creation of Tetris.

Paul Mockapetris
Research scientist, USC Information Sciences Institute (1978-1995)
Working at USC’s Information Sciences Institute in 1983, Mockapetris invented the Domain Name System (DNS), the directory that translates website names like “usc.edu” into the numeric addresses computers actually use. It remains the addressing backbone of the entire internet more than 40 years later.

Richard Bellman (USC faculty 1965–1984)
Professor of Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, and Medicine
Bellman invented dynamic programming, a foundational method for solving complex, multi-step decision problems that’s now used throughout computer science, economics, and artificial intelligence. The “Bellman Equation” he developed remains a cornerstone of modern reinforcement learning algorithms.

Tomlinson Holman (USC faculty, 1987-2013)
Professor of Film Sound, USC School of Cinematic Arts; USC Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering
Holman invented the THX sound system at Lucasfilm in 1983 to ensure “Return of the Jedi” would sound right in any theater — “THX” stands for “Tomlinson Holman eXperiment.” The standard he created reshaped how movie theaters, and eventually home theaters, are built around the world.

Stephen Casner
Research scientist, USC Information Sciences Institute (1973-1995)
Casner co-created the Mbone (Multicast Backbone), the experimental network that first made real-time audio and video broadcasting over the internet possible. In 1994, the Mbone was used to webcast a Rolling Stones concert worldwide — one of the first major live events ever streamed over the internet — paving the way for the livestreaming and video conferencing tools used everywhere today.

Published on June 29th, 2026

Last updated on June 29th, 2026