70 Fun Facts About Stanford

Stanford was founded in memory of Leland Jr., who died of what disease at the age of 15?

Typhoid fever: he fell ill after a snowbound visit to Athens, where the keen young collector had met Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of Troy, and died weeks later in Florence.

Besides running a railroad and serving as a state governor, Leland Stanford held which national office?

US Senator from 1885 until his death in 1893. Sixteen years earlier he had driven the golden spike that completed the transcontinental railroad; it is now on show at the campus art museum.

After their son's death, the Stanfords resolved that whose children 'shall be our children'?

California's, in the Stanfords' famous phrase: having lost their only child, they signed the founding grant in November 1885 and deeded the new university a large fortune.

Stanford's campus is nicknamed 'the Farm' because it was built on what?

The Stanfords' horse-breeding estate, the Palo Alto Stock Farm, raised trotters; there in 1878 Eadweard Muybridge photographed a galloping horse for Leland Stanford, a step toward motion pictures.

Stanford's cornerstone was laid on 14 May 1887, a date chosen because it was what?

Leland Jr.'s birthday: he would have turned 19 that day. The boy had been an avid collector, and his parents also founded a campus museum in his memory, which opened under his name in 1894.

Which landscape architect drew up the master plan for Stanford's campus?

Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York's Central Park, shared the drawing board with Leland Stanford himself; his mile-long Palm Drive still leads straight to the Quad.

The buildings of Stanford's Main Quad are built of which stone, under red tile roofs?

Sandstone, quarried locally, and red tile were meant to echo the region's old Spanish missions; the pairing is so much the campus signature that its history journal is titled Sandstone & Tile.

Stanford's founder, Leland Stanford, served a term as a state governor during which war?

The Civil War: sworn in during the Great Flood of January 1862, Stanford is said to have reached his own inauguration in Sacramento by rowboat; he left office at the end of 1863.

Co-founder Jane Stanford died in Honolulu in 1905 of which poison, in a murder case that was never solved?

Strychnine: a first dose in her mineral water had failed weeks earlier in San Francisco, so she sailed for Hawaii, where a second was slipped into her bicarbonate of soda.

Who was Stanford's first president?

David Starr Jordan, a fish scientist, led Stanford for its first 22 years; in 2020 the university took his name off campus spaces because of his promotion of eugenics.

Who declined to be Stanford's first president and recommended an old student of his instead?

Andrew White of Cornell told the Stanfords he had spent his best years building up two universities and would not begin a third, then pointed them to an old student of his who was running Indiana University.

Which subject was Herbert Hoover's one strength when he scraped into Stanford's first class?

Mathematics. Never a star student, Hoover made his mark outside class instead, serving as student treasurer and managing both the baseball and football teams.

What did Herbert Hoover major in at Stanford?

Geology. Hoover fell under the spell of Professor John Casper Branner, who gave him a job in the department because he could type and became his lifelong mentor.

In 1899 Jane Stanford capped which group of students at 500, fearing they would soon dominate the university?

Women. Their numbers were surging, and she said a mostly female university was not what her husband or son would have wished; the trustees only found a way past the cap in 1933.

Jane Stanford directed that which of her possessions be sold after her death to buy library books?

Her jewels. She had first tried to sell them in 1897 to raise money for the struggling university and found no buyers at her price; the Jewel Fund they later endowed was still buying library books a century on.

Stanford's motto, 'Die Luft der Freiheit weht', is written in which language?

German. Stanford's first president took the line from Ulrich von Hutten, a Reformation-era poet he counted among his favourite rebels, after quoting him in an early campus speech.

What does Stanford's motto mean in English?

The wind of freedom blows. The line appears on the university seal, yet Stanford itself still describes it as an unofficial motto, borrowed from a 16th-century humanist.

Which 1906 event caused major damage to the young campus?

The San Francisco earthquake wrecked Memorial Church, which was later restored, and a new library and gymnasium so badly damaged before they opened that they were never rebuilt.

Stanford surgeon Norman Shumway performed the first successful adult transplant of which organ in the United States, in 1968?

Heart. Shumway had spent years perfecting the operation on dogs, only for Christiaan Barnard to use his techniques and perform the world's first human-to-human heart transplant a month earlier in South Africa.

Herbert Hoover founded the Hoover Institution in 1919 to preserve material relating to what?

World War I. Hoover had run food relief for occupied Belgium and wanted the war's records saved for historians; his collection later grew into a public-policy think tank.

Hoover Tower was modelled on a cathedral tower in which Spanish city, whose university dates from 1218?

Salamanca. Hoover raised the money for the tower because his growing archive no longer fitted in the university library, so the campus landmark was built as a storehouse for documents.

Hoover Tower was completed in 1941 to mark what occasion?

The university's 50th anniversary. Hoover dedicated the tower that June as a library meant to promote peace while Europe was at war, and its largest bell is inscribed 'For Peace Alone Do I Ring'.

Roughly how much land does Stanford's campus cover?

8,000 acres, near enough: the university counts 8,353. The founders ruled that the land could not be sold, so even professors who own their campus homes lease the ground beneath them.

Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station overlooks Monterey Bay from which coastal town?

Pacific Grove. Stanford's first president, a fish scientist, pushed to open it in the university's very first year, and it is the oldest marine laboratory on the West Coast.

What stretches for two miles across Stanford's SLAC laboratory?

A particle accelerator. It fires electrons down a tunnel that runs beneath Interstate 280, and experiments there proved that protons are made of quarks.

Which Stanford professor and provost is called the 'Father of Silicon Valley'?

Frederick Terman. He urged his students to start electronics companies near campus instead of joining established firms in the East, and the first two to take the advice were Bill Hewlett and David Packard.

Eight of William Shockley's employees quit in 1957 to found which rival company?

Fairchild Semiconductor. Fed up with Shockley's management, the 'traitorous eight' resigned together and found a backer in a New York camera and instrument maker, whose name their new company took.

Silicon Valley takes its name from the key ingredient in what?

Transistors. Silicon is the element they are made from, and a trade-paper columnist spread the nickname in the early 1970s, when the area was still better known for its fruit orchards than for its electronics.

Stanford graduates Hewlett and Packard started their company in what?

A garage. They built their first product there, an audio oscillator, after a Stanford professor urged his students to start firms locally, and California now marks the spot as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

Which company began as a research project called BackRub by two Stanford PhD students?

Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin ran the early search engine from their dorm rooms, on a server cased in toy building bricks that Stanford still keeps on display.

Jerry Yang and David Filo co-founded which company in 1994 while at Stanford?

Yahoo. It began as 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web', a list of favourite links kept in a campus trailer that soon took up more of their time than their doctoral work.

Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim and Scott McNealy co-founded which company in 1982?

Sun Microsystems. Bechtolsheim had designed its first workstation as a Stanford graduate student, and his circuit board also ended up inside the home-built routers that linked the campus's computers.

Which networking company did Stanford computer staff members Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner found in 1984?

Cisco. Its first routers grew out of the 'Blue Box' that a team of Stanford staff and students built to link the campus's computers, and the company later had to license that technology from the university.

Which Stanford alumnus co-founded Nvidia in 1993?

Jensen Huang. He and his co-founders hatched the plan for Nvidia over a meal at a Silicon Valley Denny's, the same chain where he had washed dishes and waited tables as a teenager.

Stanford alumnus Reed Hastings co-founded which company in 1997?

He has a master's in computer science from Stanford; the company began by mailing DVDs in red envelopes.

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, both Stanford alumni, co-founded which app in 2010?

Instagram. Facebook agreed to buy it for about $1 billion in April 2012, just eighteen months after the app first appeared.

Peter Thiel and Ken Howery, both Stanford alumni, co-founded which payments company in 1998?

PayPal. The first idea was to beam money between Palm Pilots, and Thiel staffed the start-up with friends from Stanford; its veterans went on to launch YouTube and Yelp.

Which sportswear company grew out of a business plan Phil Knight wrote as a Stanford MBA student?

Nike. Knight wrote the plan for a class at Stanford's business school, and decades later he was the lead donor for the school's new campus, which carries his name.

Russell and Sigurd Varian invented which microwave tube at Stanford in 1937?

The klystron. It was the first really powerful generator of microwaves, opening the way to satellite communication, and the brothers founded Varian Associates with it as their first product.

The first ARPANET message, sent to Stanford Research Institute in 1969, crashed partway through which word?

LOGIN. Only the L and the O arrived before the receiving computer crashed, so the network's first message was 'LO'; the full word went through about an hour later.

Which Stanford researcher co-created TCP/IP with Robert Kahn in 1973?

Vint Cerf. A Stanford graduate, he came back to teach and in 1974 wrote the first full specification of the protocol with two colleagues, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine.

Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to do what, founding genetic engineering?

Transfer genes between organisms. Stanford licensed their 1973 gene-splicing method to more than 400 companies, launching the biotech industry, and Boyer went on to co-found Genentech.

Felix Bloch's measurements of atomic nuclei at Stanford underlie which medical imaging technology?

MRI. Bloch left Germany when Hitler took power and joined Stanford a year later; his 1952 prize for the method made him the university's first Nobel laureate.

Stanford physicist Arthur Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on what?

Lasers. In 1958 Schawlow and his brother-in-law Charles Townes showed on paper how the microwave maser could be made to work with light, the idea behind every laser since.

Which psychologist ran the 1971 Stanford prison experiment?

Philip Zimbardo. He cast himself as the prison superintendent and called the study off after six days of a planned two weeks, once a former student told him he had stopped seeing the volunteers' suffering.

Which Nobel-winning American novelist studied at Stanford in the 1920s but left without a degree?

John Steinbeck. Raised in nearby Salinas, he worked his way through his Stanford courses, left for New York in 1925 to try to write, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

Stanford's teams are called the Cardinal, a name often taken for the bird; what does it actually mean?

A colour. The teams are named for cardinal red, which is why the name is singular, and a university president made it official in 1981 after rival ideas such as Robber Barons and Griffins had fizzled.

The Tree is officially the mascot of what?

The Band. Stanford itself has no official mascot, so the Tree, a nod to El Palo Alto, the old redwood beside the railway bridge, belongs to its marching band instead.

Which nickname did Stanford's teams use until Native American students objected in 1972?

The Indians. Native American students told President Richard Lyman the mascot insulted their heritage, the student senate voted to drop it, and later campaigns to bring it back failed.

The winner of the Big Game against Cal takes custody of what?

The Stanford Axe. It spent decades in Cal's hands until 1930, when a group of Stanford students remembered as the Immortal 21 took it back; a student committee guards it to this day.

The 1982 Big Game's wild finish is called what?

The Play. With four seconds left Cal kept the ball alive with five backward passes, and the last runner scored by ploughing through Stanford's musicians, who had marched on believing the game was won.

As of 2025, Stanford leads all schools in NCAA team championships, a record it took from which university?

UCLA. The Bruins reached 100 NCAA team titles in 2007, four years before Stanford did, yet Stanford passed them in the late 2010s and has led ever since.

What do students traditionally do at Stanford's 'Full Moon on the Quad'?

Kiss one another at midnight. It began as a ritual in which seniors welcomed first-year students to campus, and over the decades it grew into a mass kissing party with live music and body paint.

Stanford's 'Wacky Walk' is a tradition at which event?

Commencement. Instead of a solemn procession, the graduating class strides into Stanford Stadium in wacky costumes before the ceremony turns serious.

Stanford's Mausoleum Party, thrown at the founding family's tomb, celebrates which occasion?

Halloween. Students in costume dance in the courtyard of the tomb where Leland, Jane and their son lie; the party lapsed for four years for want of a sponsor before students revived it in 2006.

Stanford's Big Game Gaieties is what kind of show?

An original student musical. The show dates from 1911, when the Big Game itself was still being played as rugby, and after falling silent in 1968 it was revived in the 1970s.

Stanford's White Memorial Fountain, installed in 1964, is known to students by what nickname?

The Claw. The fountain honours two brothers, William and John White, students who died in separate accidents before they could graduate, and a toy bear standing for Cal's mascot is skewered on it before each Big Game.

'The Dish', a landmark in the foothills above Stanford, is what?

A radio telescope. The 150-foot Dish went up in the early 1960s to probe the upper atmosphere, and it still earns its keep talking to spacecraft while hikers circle the hill below it.

Stanford's Cantor Arts Center holds one of the world's largest collections of which sculptor?

Auguste Rodin. Most of the bronzes were gifts from the banker B. Gerald Cantor and his wife Iris, devoted collectors of his work, and the museum was later renamed after them.

Which architect designed the 1937 Hanna–Honeycomb House on the Stanford campus?

Frank Lloyd Wright. He drew the whole plan on a grid of hexagons, like the cells of a honeycomb, which is how a professor's home on a campus hillside got its nickname.

Roughly what share of applicants won a place in Stanford's undergraduate Class of 2027?

About 4%. Stanford admitted 3.91% of that year's applicants, and it no longer announces the figure with its decisions, leaving it to surface months later in a public data filing.

As of August 2025, roughly how large was Stanford's endowment?

$40 billion. The fund stood at $40.8 billion, so large for each student that a 2025 federal law raised the tax on its investment income from 1.4% to 8%.

Which Stanford alumnus served as the 16th Chief Justice of the United States?

William Rehnquist. He finished first in his Stanford Law class, where he dated classmate Sandra Day O'Connor and proposed to her by letter; she said no, and they later served on the Supreme Court together.

Which golfer left Stanford in 1996 to turn professional?

Tiger Woods. He won the NCAA individual title in his second and last Stanford season, turned professional that August, and within eight months had won the Masters.

Who became Stanford's 13th president in August 2024?

Jonathan Levin. A Stanford graduate who had run its business school, he took over a year after Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned amid questions about his research papers; his own father had been president of Yale.

What did Stanford create on its Palo Alto land in 1951?

A university research park. Short of money but rich in land after the war, Stanford began leasing plots to technology firms, and its engineering dean championed the plan to keep his best graduates from leaving for jobs in the East.

Which athletic league did Stanford join in 2024?

The ACC. With the Pac-12 collapsing around them, Stanford and Cal joined SMU in moving to the Atlantic Coast Conference, which put two Pacific-coast schools in an East Coast league.

Stanford uses Jasper Ridge, west of its campus, as what?

A biological preserve. Stanford set the ridge aside in 1973 as an outdoor laboratory for studying ecosystems, which is why visitors see it on docent-led tours.

Which Stanford physics graduate became the first American woman in space in 1983?

Sally Ride. She spotted NASA's call for astronauts in the student newspaper while finishing her physics doctorate, having also played on the university's varsity tennis team.

Which 1962 novel grew out of Ken Kesey's years in Stanford's creative writing program?

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. While in the program Kesey volunteered for drug experiments at the veterans' hospital in nearby Menlo Park, an experience he drew on for the novel.