Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford,
California, adjacent to Palo Alto and between San Jose and San Francisco. Its 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km2) campus is one of the largest in the United States. Stanford also has land and facilities elsewhere.
The university was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford was a former Governor of California and U.S. Senator; he made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students 124 years ago on October 1, 1891, as a coeducational and non-denominational institution.
Stanford University struggled financially after Leland Stanford's death in 1893 and again 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 later be known as Silicon Valley.The rise of Silicon Valley helped Stanford become one of the world's most prestigious universities. The university is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.
There are three academic schools that have both undergraduate and graduate students and another four professional schools. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBSPac-12 Conference. It has gained 109 NCAA team championships, the second-most for a university, 476 individual championships, the most in Division I, and has won the NACDA Directors' Cup, recognizing the university with the best overall athletic team achievement, for 22 consecutive years, beginning in 1994–1995.
Stanford faculty and alumni have founded a large number of companies that produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world. It is the alma mater of 30 living billionaires, 17 astronauts, and 20 Turing Award laureates. It is also one of the leading producers of members of the United States Congress. Sixty Nobel laureates and seven Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty or staff.
Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford's previous Palo Alto farm. Despite being impacted by earthquakes in both 1906 and 1989, the campus was rebuilt each time. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The Stanford Medical Center, completed in 1959, is a teaching hospital with over 800 beds. The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), which was established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.
Most of Stanford University is on an 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km2) campus on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (30 km) northwest of San Jose; this is the founding grant. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped. Besides the central campus described below, the university also operates at several more remote locations, some elsewhere on the main campus, some further afield (see below).
Stanford's main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.
