List of Famous people born in Massachusetts, United States of America

Leonard Penn was an American film, television and theatre actor.

Elliot Aronson is an American psychologist who has carried out experiments on the theory of cognitive dissonance, and invented the Jigsaw Classroom, a cooperative teaching technique which facilitates learning while reducing interethnic hostility and prejudice. In his 1972 social psychology textbook, The Social Animal, he stated Aronson's First Law: "People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy," thus asserting the importance of situational factors in bizarre behavior. He is the only person in the 120-year history of the American Psychological Association to have won all three of its major awards: for writing, for teaching, and for research. In 2007 he received the William James Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science, in which he was cited as the scientist who "fundamentally changed the way we look at everyday life.” A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Aronson as the 78th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He officially retired in 1994 but continues to teach and write.

Jane Maria Swift is an education executive, speaker and former political leader who served as the 69th lieutenant governor of Massachusetts from 1999 to 2003 and, concurrently, as acting governor from April 2001 to January 2003. She is the only woman to perform the duties of governor of Massachusetts. At the time she became acting governor, Swift was 36 years old, making her the youngest female governor or acting governor in U.S. history. Since leaving elected office she has worked in the private sector as a Chief Executive Officer, board member and consultant for education technology companies, as well as serving on corporate and non-profit boards, teaching and lecturing on topics pertaining to women and leadership, and supporting philanthropies that address issues of importance to women and girls. She was CEO of Middlebury Interactive Languages from 2011 to 2017.

Norman Levinson was an American mathematician. Some of his major contributions were in the study of Fourier transforms, complex analysis, non-linear differential equations, number theory, and signal processing. He worked closely with Norbert Wiener in his early career. He joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1937. In 1954, he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize of the American Mathematical Society and in 1971 the Chauvenet Prize of the Mathematical Association of America for his paper A Motivated Account of an Elementary Proof of the Prime Number Theorem. In 1974 he published a paper proving that more than a third of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function lie on the critical line, a result later improved to two fifths by Conrey.

William Scott Landay is an American novelist and former lawyer.

Adam Green is an American actor and filmmaker known for horror and comedy films, including the Hatchet franchise, 2010's Frozen, and the television series Holliston.

William Cullen Bryant was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post.

Eliot Fette Noyes was a Harvard-trained American architect and industrial designer, who worked on projects for IBM, most notably the IBM Selectric typewriter and the IBM Aerospace Research Center in Los Angeles, California. Noyes was also a pioneer in development of comprehensive corporate-wide design programs that integrated design strategy and business strategy. Noyes worked on corporate imagery for IBM, Mobil Oil, Cummins Engine and Westinghouse.

Charles A. Dinarello is a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado at Denver. He is an expert on inflammatory cytokines, specifically Interleukin 1.