William (Willy) A. Higinbotham (October 25, 1910 - November 10, 1994), a physicist, is credited with creating one of the first video games, Tennis For Two, which is similar to Pong. He created it on an oscilloscope in 1958 to entertain visitors at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the nuclear research facility where he worked.

He was also the first chairman of the Federation of American Scientists.

He earned his undergraduate degree from Williams College in 1932 and continued his studies at Cornell University and MIT. During World War II, he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory and headed the lab's electronics group in the latter years of the war.