What’s the Story? The TI Plaza Statue

06.08.2022

UT Dallas’ statue of Jack Kilby, co-recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics.

Passersby may have noticed a statue of a tall, bespectacled man overlooking Texas Instruments Plaza.

What’s the story behind the lifesize, bronze statue of Jack Kilby? He is the TI engineer who helped invent the integrated circuit, for which he shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics, as well as the handheld calculator, among other things.

In 2019 Dallas real estate developer Harlan Crow offered to commission a statue for the UT Dallas campus as he has done for other institutions, such as at UT Southwestern, where a statue of Dr. Donald Seldin welcomes visitors to the main campus.

His stipulation was that the statue be of a brilliant scientist. UTD leaders were tasked with choosing that individual, and Kilby was the unanimous choice. The intersection of TI and UTD is a common theme in each institution’s history.

Before the University existed, three of TI’s founders — Eugene McDermott, Erik Jonsson and Cecil Green — established the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest in 1961. This center for higher education evolved into UT Dallas in 1969, and the ties between TI and UTD have remained strong ever since.

The completed bronze statue was gifted to the University in fall 2021. And in his hands? A replica pocket calculator and a schematic of an integrated circuit.

From left: Dr. William Osborne, dean of the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science from 1995 to 2002; Jack Kilby, former TI engineer; and Charles Miller, former UT System regent, at the 2001 groundbreaking of the Engineering and Computer Science South building.