As of 2019, multiple heads of state, royalty, one U.S. Supreme Court justice, five U.S. governors, 17 billionaires, 37 Nobel Laureates, 8 Turing Award winners, 5 Fields Medalists, 31 MacArthur Fellows, 167 Guggenheim Fellows,  3 astronauts, 7 Abel Prize winners, 7 Lasker Award winners, a Crafoord Prize winner, 26 Pulitzer Prize winners, 37 Academy Award winners, 30 Emmy Award winners, 25 Tony Award winners, 12 Grammy Award winners, multiple Forbes 30 under 30 and Time 100 notables, and numerous members of the National Academies of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, United States Congress, and U.S. diplomats have been affiliated with faculty or alumni.
Multiple Rhode Scholars, Marshal Scholars, Schwarzman Scholars, and a Mitchell Scholar are affiliated with the university, with NYU Abu Dhabi producing more Rhodes Scholars per student than any university in the world.

NYU has more than 500,000 living alumni as of 2015.
As of October 2019, 37 Nobel Prize winners are affiliated with NYU.
The university is also associated with a great number of important inventions and discoveries, such as cardiac defibrillator and artificial cardiac pacemaker (Barouh Berkovits), closed-chest cardiac defibrillator (William B. Kouwenhoven), laser (Gordon Gould), atom bomb (Frederick Reines), polio vaccine (Albert Sabin), RFID (Mario Cardullo), telephone handset (Robert G. Brown), wireless microphone (Hung-Chang Lin), first digital image scanner (Russell A. Kirsch), television (Benjamin Adler), light beer (Joseph Owades), non-stick cookware (John Gilbert), black hole thermodynamics (Jacob Bekenstein), polymer science (Herman Francis Mark), microwave (Ernst Weber), X-ray crystallography (Paul Peter Ewald), barcode (Jerome Swartz), structure of the DNA (Francis Crick), tau lepton (Martin Lewis Perl), processes for creating food coloring, decaffeination and sugar substitute (Torunn Atteraas Garin), processes for the mass production of penicillin (Jasper H. Kane), X-ray generator and rotational radiation therapy (John G. Trump), nuclear reactor and hydrogen bomb (John Archibald Wheeler), and contact lenses (Norman Gaylord), among many others.
Alumnus Fred Waller who invented Cinerama and the Waller Gunnery Trainer, also obtained the first patent for a water ski.
The first patents for touch screen cash machine (Richard J. Orford), and zoom lens (Leonard Bergstein), were also obtained by NYU alumni.

Some of the most prolific inventors in American history are NYU alumni, for example Jerome H. Lemelson whose 605 patents involved the cordless telephone, fax machine, videocassette recorder and camcorder, among others; Samuel Ruben whose inventions include electric battery; James Wood who invented cable-lift elevator, fabricated the steel cables for the Brooklyn Bridge and contributed to the development of lockmaking, submarine, electric generator, electric motor, transformer and the design of the refrigerator; and Albert Macovski whose innovations include the single-tube color camera and real-time phased array imaging for ultrasound.
NYU is the birthplace of the tractor beam and 5G. Before and during World War II, NYU's Tandon School of Engineering worked on problems whose solution led to the development of radar, and later broke ground in electromagnetic theory, electronics in general, and solved re-entry problems of the manned space capsules, as well as helped develop and design the NASDAQ Automated Quote System and trading floors.
Developer of the early telephone systems in the United States Bancroft Gherardi Jr., developer of the submarine communications facilities Jack M. Sipress, inventor of Italy's first computer Mario Tchou, designer of the Panama Canal locks Henry C. Goldmark, designer of the Pentagon Hugh John Casey, designer of the Apollo Lunar Module Thomas J. Kelly, as well as the designer of virtually every major bridge in New York City from the George Washington to the Verrazano, Leopold Just, are also NYU alumni.

Many of the world's most renowned companies, such as IBM (Charles Ranlett Flint), Twitter (Jack Dorsey), Bloomber
As of 2019, multiple heads of state, royalty, one U.S. Supreme Court justice, five U.S. governors, 17 billionaires, 37 Nobel Laureates, 8 Turing Award winners, 5 Fields Medalists, 31 MacArthur Fellows, 167 Guggenheim Fellows,  3 astronauts, 7 Abel Prize winners, 7 Lasker Award winners, a Crafoord Prize winner, 26 Pulitzer Prize winners, 37 Academy Award winners, 30 Emmy Award winners, 25 Tony Award winners, 12 Grammy Award winners, multiple Forbes 30 under 30 and Time 100 notables, and numerous members of the National Academies of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, United States Congress, and U.S. diplomats have been affiliated with faculty or alumni. Multiple Rhode Scholars, Marshal Scholars, Schwarzman Scholars, and a Mitchell Scholar are affiliated with the university, with NYU Abu Dhabi producing more Rhodes Scholars per student than any university in the world.
NYU has more than 500,000 living alumni as of 2015. As of October 2019, 37 Nobel Prize winners are affiliated with NYU. The university is also associated with a great number of important inventions and discoveries, such as cardiac defibrillator and artificial cardiac pacemaker (Barouh Berkovits), closed-chest cardiac defibrillator (William B. Kouwenhoven), laser (Gordon Gould), atom bomb (Frederick Reines), polio vaccine (Albert Sabin), RFID (Mario Cardullo), telephone handset (Robert G. Brown), wireless microphone (Hung-Chang Lin), first digital image scanner (Russell A. Kirsch), television (Benjamin Adler), light beer (Joseph Owades), non-stick cookware (John Gilbert), black hole thermodynamics (Jacob Bekenstein), polymer science (Herman Francis Mark), microwave (Ernst Weber), X-ray crystallography (Paul Peter Ewald), barcode (Jerome Swartz), structure of the DNA (Francis Crick), tau lepton (Martin Lewis Perl), processes for creating food coloring, decaffeination and sugar substitute (Torunn Atteraas Garin), processes for the mass production of penicillin (Jasper H. Kane), X-ray generator and rotational radiation therapy (John G. Trump), nuclear reactor and hydrogen bomb (John Archibald Wheeler), and contact lenses (Norman Gaylord), among many others. Alumnus Fred Waller who invented Cinerama and the Waller Gunnery Trainer, also obtained the first patent for a water ski. The first patents for touch screen cash machine (Richard J. Orford), and zoom lens (Leonard Bergstein), were also obtained by NYU alumni.
Some of the most prolific inventors in American history are NYU alumni, for example Jerome H. Lemelson whose 605 patents involved the cordless telephone, fax machine, videocassette recorder and camcorder, among others; Samuel Ruben whose inventions include electric battery; James Wood who invented cable-lift elevator, fabricated the steel cables for the Brooklyn Bridge and contributed to the development of lockmaking, submarine, electric generator, electric motor, transformer and the design of the refrigerator; and Albert Macovski whose innovations include the single-tube color camera and real-time phased array imaging for ultrasound. NYU is the birthplace of the tractor beam and 5G. Before and during World War II, NYU's Tandon School of Engineering worked on problems whose solution led to the development of radar, and later broke ground in electromagnetic theory, electronics in general, and solved re-entry problems of the manned space capsules, as well as helped develop and design the NASDAQ Automated Quote System and trading floors. Developer of the early telephone systems in the United States Bancroft Gherardi Jr., developer of the submarine communications facilities Jack M. Sipress, inventor of Italy's first computer Mario Tchou, designer of the Panama Canal locks Henry C. Goldmark, designer of the Pentagon Hugh John Casey, designer of the Apollo Lunar Module Thomas J. Kelly, as well as the designer of virtually every major bridge in New York City from the George Washington to the Verrazano, Leopold Just, are also NYU alumni.
Many of the world's most renowned companies, such as IBM (Charles Ranlett Flint), Twitter (Jack Dorsey), Bloomber
New York University