Early Background
Henry Singleton was raised on a small ranch near Haslet, Texas, a few miles northwest of Fort Worth. His higher education began in 1933 at North Texas Agricultural College, Arlington. After two years there, he received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, starting over as a Plebe (Freshman) in 1935. His roommate was fellow Plebe George A. Roberts, who would later join him in developing Teledyne. During his first two years at Annapolis, Singleton ranked first in mathematics from a class of 820 students. A reoccurring medical problem made it necessary for him to leave the Academy in 1938.
After the Academy, Singleton elected to study electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and graduated in 1940, receiving both bachelor’s (Sc.B.) and master’s (Sc.M.) degrees in this field. During his first year there, he was a member of a three-man team that won the Putnam Prize in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, administered annually by the Mathematical Association of America. Another member of the team was Richard P. Feynman, a future Nobel Prize Laureate. As described later, Singleton eventually returned to MIT for doctoral studies, earning the Sc.D. degree, also in electrical engineering, in 1950.
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