The Phi Beta Kappa Society is an academic honor society. Its mission is to "celebrate and advocate excellence in the liberal arts and sciences"; and induct "the most outstanding students of arts and sciences at America’s leading colleges and universities." Founded at The College of William and Mary on December 5, 1776, as the first collegiate Greek-letter fraternity, it is also the oldest honor society for the liberal arts and sciences and among the oldest undergraduate societies in the United States. Phi Beta Kappa (ΦΒΚ) stands for Φιλοσοφία Βίου Κυβερνήτης or philosophia biou kybernētēs — "Love of learning is the guide of life".

Each individual chapter determines its specific application of the Phi Beta Kappa Council's 1952 Stipulations Concerning Eligibility for Membership and sets its own academic standards.

Since inception, 17 U.S. Presidents, 37 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 1 NFL MVP, 1 Heisman Trophy winner, and 136 Nobel Laureates have been inducted members.

According to the society, "only about 10 percent of the nation's institutions of higher learning have Phi Beta Kappa chapters," and of the institutions with chapters, only about 10 percent of the arts and sciences graduates are elected to Phi Beta Kappa membership.

Melanie Mitchell is a professor of computer science at Portland State University. She has worked at the Santa Fe Institute and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her major work has been in the areas of analogical reasoning, Complex Systems, genetic algorithms and cellular automata, and her publications in those fields are frequently cited.

She received her PhD in 1990 from the University of Michigan under Douglas Hofstadter and John Holland, for which she developed the Copycat cognitive architecture. She is the author of "Analogy-Making as Perception", essentially a book about Copycat. She has also critiqued Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science[1] and also showed that genetic algorithms could find better solutions to the majority problem in cellular automata. She is the author of "An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms" (ISBN 0-262-63185-7), a widely known introductory book published by MIT Press in 1996.

The Society of the Cincinnati is a historical lineage organization with branches in the United States and France, founded in 1783 to preserve the ideals and fellowship of the American Revolutionary War officers. Now in its third century, the Society is a nonprofit historical, diplomatic, and educational organization that promotes public interest in the American Revolution through its library and museum collections, exhibitions, programs, publications, and other activities.

The concept of the Society of the Cincinnati was started by Major General Henry Knox. The first meeting of the Society was held in May 1783 at a dinner at Mount Gulian (Verplanck House) in Fishkill, New York, before the British evacuation from New York City. The meeting was chaired by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, and the participants agreed to stay in contact with each other after the war. Membership was generally limited to officers who had served at least three years in the Continental Army or Navy; it included officers of the French Army and Navy above certain ranks.