Stanford University was founded in 1891 by the then California Senator and Railway Tycoon Henry Lan Stanford (Henry Lan Stanford) Governor and his wife Jane Lethrop Stanford (Jane Lethrop Stanford). This is to commemorate their son who died of typhoid fever (Little Leland Stanford) on the eve of his son's 16th birthday. Stanford University is a free school where men and women are equal. Until the 1930s, all tuition fees were free. However, the death of Leland Stanford in 1893 and the San Francisco earthquake that caused major damage to the campus in 1906 brought serious financial difficulties to school fees. After World War II, the then school dean Frederick Terman fully supported the entrepreneurial spirit of alumni and teachers, hoping to build a self-sufficient local industry, which is also the source of today's Silicon Valley.
The school's campus is located in the northwest of Silicon Valley, near Palo Alto. Stanford has been the home of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the United States since the 1970s, and is the origin of one of its Advanced Research Projects Agency networks (the prototype of the Internet). Each academic department of the school is divided into seven colleges, and other assets (including biological reserves and accelerated laboratories) are located outside the main campus. The school is also one of the richest educational institutions and the first university to receive more than one billion dollars in donations in one year.
Stanford University is a university with high enrollment and high selectivity. Among them, graduate courses are more diverse than undergraduate courses. Stanford students participate in different sports competitions through 36 teams. It is one of the two private universities of the Pacific Twelve Schools Alliance. As of 2018, Stanford University students and alumni have won 270 Olympic medals, including 139 gold medals from the previous Olympics. The school team has won 104 university sports association championships, ranking second among many universities. Since 1994-95, it has also been the annual champion of the National University Sports Instructor Cup.
As of March 2020, Stanford University alumni, professors and researchers have produced 83 Nobel Prize winners, 8 Fields Prize winners and 28 Turing Prize winners. Stanford University has trained many celebrities. Its alumni include 30 wealthy entrepreneurs and 17 astronauts. It is also one of the institutions that train the most members of the US Congress. Stanford alumni have established many famous companies around the world, such as: Google, Yahoo, HP, Cisco Systems, Nike, Sun Microsystems, TSMC, Huida, Electronic Arts, etc. The total amount of funds is equal to the tenth largest economic system in the world (as of 2011).
