California Institute of Technology facts for kids
Motto | "The truth shall make you free" |
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Type | Private |
Established | 1891 |
Endowment | US $1.55 billion |
President | Jean-Lou Chameau |
Academic staff
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294 professorial faculty 1207 other faculty |
Students | 2175 |
Undergraduates | 967 |
Postgraduates | 1208 |
Location | , , |
Campus | Urban, 124 acres (50 ha) |
Colors | Orange and White |
Athletics | NCAA Division III |
Mascot | Beaver |
Website | caltech.edu |
The California Institute of Technology (called "Caltech" for short) is a major American research university in the city of Pasadena in the state of California. Caltech specializes - is especially good, or especially interested - in the study of engineering, computer science, and the physical sciences (some physical sciences are physics and chemistry, as well as others). Caltech is also in charge of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also called JPL. JPL is part of NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which is the part of the United States government that explores space. Caltech is not owned or run by the United States, or NASA, but NASA pays Caltech to run JPL for them. By most measures, it is the most selective college/university in the world and has one of the highest faculty-to-student ratios in the world.
Caltech's mascot is the beaver. Many schools that specialize in engineering have beavers for their mascot, because in the wild, beavers are known for making dams, and so people think that they are the animal most like engineers.
Famous alumni
Images for kids
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Richard C. Tolman and Albert Einstein at Caltech, 1932
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Aerial view of Caltech in Pasadena, California
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Nobel laureate Carl David Anderson, BS 1927, PhD 1930, discoverer of the positron and the muon
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Nobel laureate Douglas D. Osheroff, BS 1967
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Nobel laureate William Shockley, BS 1932, co-inventor of the solid state transistor, father of Silicon Valley
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Nobel laureate Edwin McMillan, BS 1928, MS 1929
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Nobel laureate Vernon Smith, BS 1949
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Turing Award laureate Fernando J. Corbató, BS 1950
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Turing Award laureate Donald Knuth, PhD 1963, "father" of the analysis of algorithms, creator of TeX typesetting system
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Turing Award laureate John McCarthy, BS 1948, inventor of the Lisp programming language
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Astronaut and United States Senator Harrison Schmitt, BS 1957, the only geologist to have walked on the moon
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Qian Xuesen, PhD 1939, co-founder of JPL, "Father" of Chinese rocketry
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Gordon Moore, PhD 1954, co-founder of Intel
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Benoit Mandelbrot, MS 1948, Engineering 1949, father of fractal geometry, namesake of the Mandelbrot set
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Charlie Munger, studied meteorology at Caltech, investor, Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
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Frank Capra, BS Chemical Engineering 1918 (when Caltech was known as the "Throop Institute"); winner of six Academy Awards in directing and producing; producer and director of It's a Wonderful Life
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Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, BS 1962, known for his prolific contributions in gravitation physics and astrophysics and co-founding of LIGO
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Stephen Wolfram, PhD 1979, creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha; one of the first MacArthur Fellows in 1981
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Stanislav Smirnov, PhD 1996, 2010 Fields Medal winner for his work on the mathematical foundations of statistical physics, particularly finite lattice models
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France A. Córdova, PhD 1978, Astrophysicist and 14th Director of the National Science Foundation
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Nobel laureate Eric Betzig, BS 1983, known for his work on fluorescence microscopy and photoactivated localization microscopy
See also
In Spanish: Instituto Tecnológico de California para niños