Some time ago I had a chance to visit California (first time in US) and stayed at Palo Alto. Palo Alto and the neighboring area (from San Francisco to San Jose), also known as Silicon Valley, is famous for having the headquarters of well-known technological companies, such as Google, Facebook, Apple to name a few. Besides that, Palo Alto is home to Stanford University, where many tech startups give their roots. I couldn’t miss the chance to visit the campuses of these famous organizations while I stayed there.

The hotel where I stayed was close to Stanford University campus. The first thing to notice while entering campus is the abundance of old trees, the feeling like walking through forest. One can see very old trees:

And I could make a shot of unique colored bird and squirrel in single picture:

Tallest building in the campus: Hoover tower, named after US president Herbert Hoover, and nice views from the top of the tower (it was cloudy weather, therefore the images might be darker than usual):

The set of red-roofed buildings comprising “Main Quad”:

Panoramic view of Stanford:

One of sides of Main Quad (one can notice the word “Engineering” there):

And another corner (“History”). Very finely graved arc surface:

View between those sides above, statues of two people:

I asked one of many Chinese tourists wandering around the campus to take a picture at the famous part of the campus:

“Burghers of Calais”:

Walkways along the arcs:

Memorial Church, with detailed painting on the surface of the wall. The church was commissioned by Jane Stanford as a memorial to her husband Leland Stanford:

Inner Quad courtyard, with tropical palm trees:

Variety of aloe in one of eight planting circles in the courtyard:

Buildings outside Main Quad:

Nice view along the palm trees:

 Main library building (“Green Library”):

Stanford has impressive statistics regarding its alumni. Here is the exempt from wikipedia:

Stanford faculty and alumni have founded many companies including Google, Hewlett-Packard, Nike, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo!, and companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world. Fifty-nine Nobel laureates have been affiliated with the University, and it is the alma mater of 30 living billionaires and 17 astronauts. Stanford has produced a total of 18 Turing Award laureates. It is also one of the leading producers of members of the United States Congress.

Walking further Main Quad one can find buildings named after very famous people from tech world. One of such buildings is Paul G. Allen Building named after co-founder of Microsoft. The building of Center for Integrated Systems took Allen’s name after he gifted funds to School of Engineering:

William Hewlett Teaching Center, named after co-founder of Hewlett-Packard (HP):

David Packard Electrical Engineering, named after the other co-founder of Hewlett-Packard:

Walking further one can see the Computer Science building:

… and it is named after … guess who … William (Bill) Gates. He gave 6M$ gift to construct this building:

I had a chance to go inside this building. Stanford CS students have abundant options for their further career options just from their faculty board 🙂

It turns out that the architecture of backbone technology of internet – TCP/IP was conceived when Vinton Cerf, its co-author was at Stanford.

And finally the pictures of students organizing some events:

I really liked buildings, trees, and atmosphere of Stanford campus, and I think students here truly enjoy their studying.