List of City College of New York alumni

Nobel laureates

 * Julius Axelrod 1933 – Nobel laureate in Medicine, 1970
 * Kenneth Arrow 1940 – Nobel laureate in Economics, 1972
 * Herbert Hauptman 1937 – Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1985
 * Robert Hofstadter 1935 – Nobel laureate in Physics, 1961
 * Jerome Karle 1937 – Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1985
 * Arthur Kornberg 1937 – Nobel laureate in Medicine, 1959
 * Leon M. Lederman 1943 – Nobel laureate in Physics, 1988
 * Arno Penzias 1954 – Nobel laureate in Physics, 1978
 * Robert J. Aumann 1950 – Nobel laureate in Economics, 2005
 * John O'Keefe, 1963 – Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2014

Rhodes Scholars

 * James T. Molloy 1939

Chancellors

 * Matthew Goldstein – former chancellor of the City University of New York (1999-2013).

Politics, government and sociology

 * Herman Badillo 1951 – former Congressman and Chairman of CUNY's Board of Trustees, an architect of the University's academic rebirth
 * Bernard M. Baruch 1889 – Wall Street financier; adviser to American Presidents for 40 years, from Woodrow Wilson to John F. Kennedy
 * Abraham D. Beame 1928 – mayor of New York City, 1974 to 1977
 * Daniel Bell – sociologist, professor at Harvard University
 * Stephen Bronner – political theorist, Marxist, professor at Rutgers University
 * Upendra J. Chivukula – first Asian American elected to the New Jersey General Assembly
 * Henry Cohen 1943 – Director of Föhrenwald DP Camp; founding dean of the Milano School for Management and Urban Policy at The New School
 * Suzanne DiMaggio - long-time analyst of U.S. Foreign Policy in Asia and the Middle East
 * Benjamin B. Ferencz 1920 – international jurist
 * Abraham Foxman – National Director of the Anti-Defamation League
 * Felix Frankfurter 1902 – justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1939-1962
 * George Friedman – founder of Stratfor, author, professor of political science, security and defense analyst
 * Nathan Glazer – sociologist and professor at Harvard University
 * Irving Howe – coined the phrase "New York Jewish Intellectual"
 * Robert T. Johnson 1972 – Bronx District Attorney
 * Henry Kissinger – Nobel Peace Prize and Secretary of State, National Security Advisor (did not graduate)
 * Ed Koch 1945 – mayor of New York City, 1978-1989
 * Irving Kristol 1940 – neoconservative pundit
 * Melvin J. Lasky 1938 – anti-communist; editor of Encounter 1958-1991
 * Milton Leitenberg 1955 - American arms control expert
 * Guillermo Linares 1975 – first Dominican-American New York City Council member
 * Colin Powell – United States Secretary of State (2001–2005); Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989–1993) and U.S. Army General; National Security Advisor (1987–1989)
 * Sal Restivo 1965 – pioneer ethnographer of science; one of the founders of the sociology of mathematics; founding member and former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science
 * Julius Rosenberg – infamous convicted spy during the Cold War
 * Robert F. Wagner Sr. – United States Senator from New York, 1927-1949
 * Michele Wallace 1975 – major figure in African-American studies, feminist studies and cultural studies
 * Stephen Samuel Wise 1891 – Reform rabbi, early Zionist and social justice activist
 * Marilyn Zayas 1965 - Judge, Ohio's First District Court of Appeals

The arts

 * Maurice Ashley 1993 – first African-American International Chess Grandmaster
 * Paddy Chayefsky – playwright and screenwriter; wrote Marty, Hospital and Altered States
 * Carl Dreher 1917 – sound engineer, nominated for Sound Recording Academy Awards for the films The Gay Divorcee and I Dream Too Much
 * Ira Gershwin 1918 – lyricist, collaborator with, and brother of George Gershwin
 * Marv Goldberg 1964 – music historian in the field of rhythm & blues
 * Hazelle Goodman 1986 – stage, screen and TV actress; first African-American to hold a leading role in a Woody Allen film, Deconstructing Harry
 * Arthur Guiterman – humorous poet
 * Luis Guzmán – actor
 * E.Y. "Yip" Harburg 1918 – lyricist (The Wizard of Oz, Finian's Rainbow)
 * Judd Hirsch 1960 – actor
 * Alvin Hollingsworth - painter, co-organizer of African American artist contributors to 1963 March on Washington, and early comic book artist
 * Ernest Lehman 1937 (BS) – screenwriter (North by Northwest, The Sound of Music, Sweet Smell of Success, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
 * David Margulies – actor
 * Jackie Mason – comedian and actor
 * Sterling Morrison 1970 – musician, co-founder of The Velvet Underground
 * Zero Mostel 1935 – actor
 * Faith Ringgold 1959 – artist and children's book author and illustrator
 * Edward G. Robinson 1914 – actor
 * Richard Schiff 1983 – Emmy Award-winning actor; star of The West Wing (his character, Toby Ziegler, also attended CCNY)
 * Ben Shahn – artist
 * Gabourey Sidibe – actress
 * Alfred Stieglitz 1884 – photographer
 * Eli Wallach 1938 MA – actor

Literature and journalism

 * Alan Abelson 1942 – columnist, former editor, Barron's
 * Morris Raphael Cohen – philosopher, lawyer, and legal scholar
 * Dan Daniel 1910 – Dean of American Sportswriters
 * Davidson Garrett 1988- American poet
 * Gary Gruber 1962 – best selling author, educator, physicist
 * Oscar Hijuelos 1975 – won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
 * Jack Kroll 1937 – culture editor, Newsweek
 * Paul Levinson – author of The Plot to Save Socrates and The Silk Code; winner of Locus Award, 1999
 * Bernard Malamud 1936 (BA) – author; won 1967 Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for his novel The Fixer, National Book Award for The Magic Barrel; also wrote The Natural (1952)
 * Montrose Jonas Moses – author
 * Walter Mosley 1991 MA – best-selling author whose novels about private eye Easy Rawlins have received Edgar and Golden Dagger Awards
 * Michael Oreskes 1975 – Executive Editor of the International Herald Tribune
 * Mario Puzo – bestselling novelist, screenwriter, The Godfather
 * Selwyn Raab – investigative journalist for The New York Times
 * Alexander Rosenberg 1967 – novelist and philosopher
 * A.M. Rosenthal 1949 – won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Was Executive Editor of The New York Times
 * Henry Roth – novelist and author of Call It Sleep, a novel on the Jewish immigrant experience
 * Robert Scheer – journalist and radio host
 * Stephen Shepard 1961 – editor in chief, Business Week
 * Anatole Shub – editor and journalist specializing in Eastern European matters
 * Upton Sinclair 1897 BA – author of The Jungle (1906)
 * Robert Sobel 1951 BSS, 1952 MA – best-selling author of business histories
 * Gary Weiss 1975 – investigative journalist; author of Born to Steal (2003) and Wall Street Versus America (2006)

Science and technology

 * Solomon Asch – psychologist, known for the Asch conformity experiments
 * Julius Blank – engineer, member of the "traitorous eight" who founded Silicon Valley
 * Marvin Chester 1952 – physicist, quantum physics emeritus professor at UCLA
 * Adin Falkoff – engineer, computer scientist, co-inventor of the APL language interactive system
 * Richard D. Gitlin 1964 – engineer, co-invention of DSL Bell Labs
 * George Washington Goethals 1887 – civil engineer, best known for his supervision of construction and the opening of the Panama Canal
 * Dan Goldin 1962 – 9th and longest-tenured administrator of NASA
 * Walter S. Graf – cardiologist, pioneer in creation of emergency paramedic care system
 * Robert E. Kahn 1960 – Internet pioneer, co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, co-recipient of the Turing Award in 2004
 * Allen Kent – pioneer of information science, especially mechanized information retrieval
 * Gary A. Klein 1964 – research psychologist, known for pioneering the field of naturalistic decision making
 * Leonard Kleinrock 1957 – Internet pioneer
 * Solomon Kullback – mathematician; NSA cryptology pioneer
 * Lewis Mumford – historian of technology
 * Charles Lane Poor – noted astronomer
 * Mario Runco, Jr. 1974 – astronaut
 * Jonas Salk 1934 – inventor of the Salk polio vaccine
 * Philip H. Sechzer 1934 – anesthesiologist, pioneer in pain management; inventor of patient-controlled analgesia
 * Abraham Sinkov – mathematician; NSA (National Security Agency) cryptology pioneer
 * David B. Steinman 1906 – engineer; bridge designer
 * Leonard Susskind 1962 – physicist, string theory
 * Victor Twersky 1943 – physicist, scattering theory – physicist and IEEE Fellow renowned for his contributions to the multiple scattering theory; professor of applied mathematics in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at University of Illinois at Chicago (1966-1990)

Business

 * Andrew Grove 1960 – 4th employee of Intel, and eventually its president, CEO, and chairman; TIME magazine's Man of the Year in 1997; donated $26,000,000 to CCNY's Grove School of Engineering in 2006
 * Melvin Simon 1949 – real estate developer, co-founder of Simon Property Group

Sports

 * Red Holzman 1942 – basketball coach for the New York Knicks
 * Holcombe Rucker 1962 – organizer and namesake of the Rucker Tournament

Fictional alumni

 * Lennie Briscoe – character from the TV show Law & Order
 * Don Draper – character on the TV show Mad Men
 * Brian Flanagan – character from the 1988 film Cocktail
 * Gordon Gekko – character from the 1987 film Wall Street
 * Nancy – character from the 1971 film Bananas
 * Toby Ziegler – character from the TV show The West Wing

References and further reading

 * S. Willis Rudy, College of the City of New York 1847–1947, 1949.
 * James Traub, City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College, 1994.
 * Paul David Pearson, The City College of New York: 150 years of academic architecture, 1997.
 * Sandra S. Roff, et al., From the Free Academy to Cuny: Illustrating Public Higher Education in New York City, 1847–1997, 2000.