Most people think that the trolley problem was invented by Oxford University philosophy professor Philippa Foot in the 1960s, but it might have been someone else. Foot wrote about the trolley problem and other problems in her 1967 essay "The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect." Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Judith Jarvis Thomson made the trolley problem famous. Now many schools teach the trolley problem. For a while, there was even a part of philosophy called trolleyology. Jarvis Thomson named the problem "the trolley problem."