Stanford University : Ask Biography

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The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an 8180 acre (3310.3 ha) campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately 20 mi (32.2 km) northwest of San Jose and 37 mi (59.5 km) southeast of San Francisco.

Leland Stanford, a Californian railroad tycoon and politician, founded the university in 1891 in honor of his son, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died of typhoid two months before his 16th birthday. The university was established as a coeducational and nondenominational institution, but struggled financially after the senior Stanford's 1893 death and after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates' entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would become known as Silicon Valley. By 1970, Stanford was home to a linear accelerator, was one of the original four ARPANET nodes, and had transformed itself into a major research university in computer science, mathematics, natural sciences, and social sciences. More than 50 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize and Stanford has the largest number of Turing award winners for a single institution. Stanford faculty and alumni have founded many prominent technology companies including Cisco Systems, Google, Hewlett-Packard, LinkedIn, Netscape Communications, Rambus, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, Varian Associates, and Yahoo!.

The university is organized into seven schools including academic schools of Humanities and Sciences and Earth Sciences as well as professional schools of Business, Education, Engineering, Law, and Medicine. Stanford has a student body of approximately 6,900 undergraduate and 8,400 graduate students. Stanford is a founding member of the Association of American Universities and in 2010 managed US$1.15 billion in research funding and $13.8 billion in endowment support, with $21.4 billion in consolidated net assets.

Stanford competes in 34 varsity sports and is one of two private universities in the Division I FBS Pacific-12 Conference. Stanford's athletic program has won the NACDA Directors' Cup every year since 1995. In the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Stanford athletes won 25 medals, including eight gold medals, more than any other university in the United States.