[1][2][3] In 2011, American Heritage Dictionary admitted his decapitalized surname, smoot, meaning a distance of 5 feet 7 inches (1.70 m), as one of the 10,000 new words added to their fifth edition.
The term is named for Smoot from his undergraduate days when he was used as a unit of measurement on the Harvard Bridge at MIT during a fraternity pledge activity.
He attended MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was a member of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity and obtained a Bachelor of Science in 1962.
From 2000–2005, he served as vice president for external voluntary standards relations of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI).
[9] On May 7, 2016, he served as the grand marshal of the parade marking the centenary of MIT's moving from Boston's Back Bay into Cambridge.