Stanford Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
70 free Stanford trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
65 free Stanford trivia questions with answers. Stanford started as a grieving railroad baron's memorial to his teenage son, on a horse farm south of San Francisco, and turned into the university that seeded Silicon Valley. This Stanford trivia quiz covers the whole arc: the founding grant of 1885, the 555 students who showed up in 1891, Jane Stanford keeping the place open through bankruptcy and earthquake, Herbert Hoover failing every entrance exam but maths, and Frederick Terman pushing his engineering graduates to go and start companies. From there it heads into the labs and garages: Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild, Sun, Cisco, Yahoo, Google, Nvidia and the rest, plus the klystron, TCP/IP, gene splicing and the two-mile accelerator at SLAC. And then the campus itself: the sandstone Quad, Hoover Tower, the Dish, the Claw, the Tree, the Axe, Full Moon on the Quad and a trophy case with more NCAA team titles than any other school. It works for alumni, applicants, Big Game week and pub quizzes. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia and reference pages, so the numbers and names here are the real ones.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Stanford was founded in memory of Leland Jr., who died of what disease at the age of 15?
Typhoid fever
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.
Q 02Besides running a railroad and serving as a state governor, Leland Stanford held which national office?
US Senator
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.
Q 03After their son's death, the Stanfords resolved that whose children 'shall be our children'?
California's
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.
Q 04Stanford's campus is nicknamed 'the Farm' because it was built on what?
The Stanfords' horse-breeding estate
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.
Q 05Stanford's cornerstone was laid on 14 May 1887, a date chosen because it was what?
Leland Jr.'s birthday
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.
Q 06Which landscape architect drew up the master plan for Stanford's campus?
Frederick Law Olmsted
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.
Q 07The buildings of Stanford's Main Quad are built of which stone, under red tile roofs?
Sandstone
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.
Q 08Stanford's founder, Leland Stanford, served a term as a state governor during which war?
The Civil 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.
Q 09Co-founder Jane Stanford died in Honolulu in 1905 of which poison, in a murder case that was never solved?
Strychnine
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.
Q 10Who was Stanford's first president?
David Starr Jordan
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.
Q 11Who declined to be Stanford's first president and recommended an old student of his instead?
Andrew White of Cornell
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.
Q 12Which subject was Herbert Hoover's one strength when he scraped into Stanford's first class?
Mathematics
Mathematics. Never a star student, Hoover made his mark outside class instead, serving as student treasurer and managing both the baseball and football teams.
Q 13What did Herbert Hoover major in at Stanford?
Geology
Q 21Hoover Tower was modelled on a cathedral tower in which Spanish city, whose university dates from 1218?
Salamanca
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.
Q 22Hoover Tower was completed in 1941 to mark what occasion?
The university's 50th anniversary
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'.
Q 23Roughly how much land does Stanford's campus cover?
8,000 acres
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.
Q 14In 1899 Jane Stanford capped which group of students at 500, fearing they would soon dominate the university?
Women
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.
Q 15Jane Stanford directed that which of her possessions be sold after her death to buy library books?
Her jewels
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.
Q 16Stanford's motto, 'Die Luft der Freiheit weht', is written in which language?
German
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.
Q 17What does Stanford's motto mean in English?
The wind of freedom blows
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.
Q 18Which 1906 event caused major damage to the young campus?
The San Francisco earthquake
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.
Q 19Stanford surgeon Norman Shumway performed the first successful adult transplant of which organ in the United States, in 1968?
Heart
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.
Q 20Herbert Hoover founded the Hoover Institution in 1919 to preserve material relating to what?
World War I
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.
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.
Q 24Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station overlooks Monterey Bay from which coastal town?
Pacific Grove
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.
Q 25What stretches for two miles across Stanford's SLAC laboratory?
A particle accelerator
A particle accelerator. It fires electrons down a tunnel that runs beneath Interstate 280, and experiments there proved that protons are made of quarks.
Q 26Which Stanford professor and provost is called the 'Father of Silicon Valley'?
Frederick Terman
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.
Q 27Eight of William Shockley's employees quit in 1957 to found which rival company?
Fairchild Semiconductor
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.
Q 28Silicon Valley takes its name from the key ingredient in what?
Transistors
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.
Q 29Stanford graduates Hewlett and Packard started their company in what?
A garage
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.
Q 30Which 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.