New York University

A private university in Greenwich Village

New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City, centred on Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. It received its charter on 21 April 1831.^[1] A charter is the formal document by which a institution is granted the right to operate and award degrees; being private means the university is not run by a state government and is financed mainly through tuition, endowment and research funding rather than a single public budget.

Mathematics and computer science: the Courant Institute

NYU's home for mathematics and computer science is the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. It was founded in 1935 and named after Richard Courant, who directed it from 1935 to 1958.^[2] An institute of this kind differs from a single department: it hosts several long-running research groups and carries the name of the person it commemorates. Within computer science, Courant concentrates on machine learning.^[2] Machine learning is the part of the field concerned with programs that improve their performance by learning from data rather than by following rules written out in advance.

Data science

The Center for Data Science was established in 2013 to advance NYU's goal of creating a world-leading training and research facility.^[5] Teaching programmes followed quickly. The MS in Data Science, launched in 2013, is described by NYU as the first of its kind.^[5] A PhD program in Data Science was introduced in 2017,^[5] and an undergraduate program in Data Science in 2019.^[5] Together these three cover the doctorate, the master's and the bachelor's levels, so a student can enter data science at NYU at any of the standard stages of a university education.

Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun joined NYU in 2003; his roles include Jacob T. Schwartz Chaired Professor of Computer Science and Neural Science.^[3] A named chair of this sort is a professorship funded by an endowment and named after its donor or the person it honours; holders typically receive extra support for their research. In 2012 LeCun became founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science.^[3] The two dates sit one year apart in the record: Wikipedia's account gives 2012 for the appointment, while NYU says the Center itself was established in 2013.^[3][5]

In 2018 LeCun shared the ACM A.M. Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, for breakthroughs that made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.^[4] The Turing Award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery and is commonly treated as the highest honour in the field. Deep neural networks are layered systems of simple numerical units whose connection weights are adjusted during training; the award cited work that turned them from a research curiosity into a standard tool.

Reorganisation in 2025

On 13 November 2025 NYU announced a new school combining Courant with an expanded Department of Computer Science and the Center for Data Science.^[2] In 2025 the Center for Data Science also became a tenure-granting department under NYU's new Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science.^[5] A school here is an organisational unit above the department, grouping several departments and centres; a tenure-granting department is one that can itself award permanent academic appointments rather than depending on a higher unit to do so.

Place in the field

The public record shows two things behind NYU's position in machine learning. One is the Courant Institute's concentration, within computer science, on machine learning.^[2] The other is the sequence of data science programmes that began with the Center in 2013 and the master's degree in the same year, and continued with the doctorate in 2017 and the undergraduate degree in 2019.^[5] The 2025 changes place mathematics, computer science and data science, previously spread across an institute, a department and a centre, inside a single school,^[2][5] and they follow by seven years the Turing Award that recognised LeCun's share in making deep neural networks central to computing.^[4]