Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
70 free Stanford trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
65 free Stanford trivia questions with answers. Stanford started as a grieving railroad baron's memorial to his teenage son, on a horse farm south of San Francisco, and turned into the university that seeded Silicon Valley. This Stanford trivia quiz covers the whole arc: the founding grant of 1885, the 555 students who showed up in 1891, Jane Stanford keeping the place open through bankruptcy and earthquake, Herbert Hoover failing every entrance exam but maths, and Frederick Terman pushing his engineering graduates to go and start companies. From there it heads into the labs and garages: Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild, Sun, Cisco, Yahoo, Google, Nvidia and the rest, plus the klystron, TCP/IP, gene splicing and the two-mile accelerator at SLAC. And then the campus itself: the sandstone Quad, Hoover Tower, the Dish, the Claw, the Tree, the Axe, Full Moon on the Quad and a trophy case with more NCAA team titles than any other school. It works for alumni, applicants, Big Game week and pub quizzes. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia and reference pages, so the numbers and names here are the real ones.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Stanford was founded in memory of Leland Jr., who died of what disease just before his 16th birthday?
Typhoid fever
He fell ill on a family tour of Europe and died in Florence in 1884; his parents decided their fortune would build a university instead.
Q 02Besides running a railroad and serving as a state governor, Leland Stanford held which national office?
US Senator
He was one of the Big Four behind the Central Pacific and drove the ceremonial golden spike at Promontory Summit in 1869.
Q 03After their son's death, Leland Stanford told his wife that whose children 'shall be our children'?
California's
The founding grant followed in November 1885, and for its first three decades the university charged no tuition at all.
Q 04Stanford's campus is nicknamed 'the Farm' because it was built on what?
The Stanfords' horse-breeding estate
The Palo Alto Stock Farm bred trotting horses; Leland Stanford's photographic study of a galloping horse there helped give birth to motion pictures.
Q 05The cornerstone was laid on 14 May 1887, a date chosen because it was what?
Leland Jr.'s birthday
He would have turned nineteen; the university opened four and a half years later.
Q 06Which landscape architect drew up the master plan for the campus?
Frederick Law Olmsted
He had designed Central Park and the Cornell campus, and he talked the Stanfords out of a hillside site in favour of the flatlands.
Q 07The buildings of the Main Quad are built of which stone, under red tile roofs?
Sandstone
The buff walls, red roofs and arcades set the template that most later campus buildings still follow.
Q 08In what year did Stanford admit its first students?
1891
It opened as coeducational and non-denominational, both unusual for the time, and Jane later capped female enrolment at 500.
Q 09How many students were there when the university opened on 1 October 1891?
555
They became known as the Pioneer Class, and one of them was a future president of the United States.
Q 10Who was Stanford's first president?
David Starr Jordan
He was a leading ichthyologist who arrived in June 1891 and had to recruit an entire faculty in four months.
Q 11To whom did the Stanfords first offer the presidency in 1891, before he declined?
Andrew White of Cornell
White had co-founded Cornell, which Olmsted had also laid out; the man he recommended ran Stanford for its first 22 years.
Q 12Herbert Hoover entered Stanford's first class despite failing every entrance exam except which subject?
Mathematics
He switched from mechanical engineering to earth science in his first year and graduated in 1895 into the teeth of a depression.
Q 13What did Herbert Hoover major in at Stanford?
Geology
He made his fortune as a mining engineer in Australia and China before politics, and became the 31st president in 1929.
Q 21Hoover Tower's design was inspired by a cathedral tower in which Spanish city?
Salamanca
At 285 feet it is the tallest building on campus, with a 48-bell carillon and an observation deck 250 feet up.
Q 22Hoover Tower was completed in 1941 to mark what occasion?
The university's 50th anniversary
Architect Arthur Brown Jr. also designed San Francisco City Hall and Coit Tower.
Q 23Roughly how large is Stanford's main campus?
8,180 acres
That is about 13 square miles, making it one of the largest campuses in the United States, with a 1,200-acre biological preserve on top.
Q 14In 1899 Jane Stanford added a rule that the number of women students should never exceed what?
500
She feared the university would become a women's college; the cap was reinterpreted as a ratio in 1933 and finally scrapped in 1973.
Q 15In 1901 Jane Stanford transferred roughly how much of her remaining wealth to the university?
$30 million
That was nearly everything she had; the trustees had wanted to close the university temporarily and she refused.
Q 16Stanford's motto, 'Die Luft der Freiheit weht', is written in which language?
German
It was a favourite line of the first president, borrowed from the humanist Ulrich von Hutten.
Q 17What does Stanford's motto mean in English?
The wind of freedom blows
During both world wars there was pressure to drop the German wording; the university kept it.
Q 18Which 1906 event caused major damage to the young campus?
The San Francisco earthquake
Memorial Church and the giant Memorial Arch were wrecked; the church was rebuilt, the arch never was.
Q 19Stanford's school of medicine was established in 1908 by acquiring which San Francisco institution?
Cooper Medical College
The school stayed in San Francisco until 1959, when it moved to the main campus.
Q 20Herbert Hoover founded the Hoover Institution in 1919 to preserve material relating to what?
World War I
He had run food relief in Belgium and Europe during the war and wanted the documents saved; it grew into a major think tank.
Q 24Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, owned since 1892, is in which coastal town?
Pacific Grove
It sits next door to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and is the oldest marine lab on the US Pacific coast.
Q 25How long is the linear accelerator at SLAC, the longest in the world?
2 miles
Established in 1962, the lab has produced Nobel-winning particle discoveries and hosted the first web server in North America.
Q 26Which Stanford professor and provost is called the 'Father of Silicon Valley'?
Frederick Terman
Two of his students were Bill Hewlett and David Packard; in the 1950s he set up the Stanford Industrial Park on university land.
Q 27Eight of William Shockley's employees quit in 1957 to found which rival company?
Fairchild Semiconductor
The 'traitorous eight' included Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, who later left again to found Intel.
Q 28Silicon Valley takes its name from the key ingredient in what?
Transistors
The name was popularised by a 1971 newspaper series; before the chip firms arrived the valley was famous for apricots and prunes.
Q 29In what year did Stanford alumni Bill Hewlett and David Packard found Hewlett-Packard?
1939
They started in a Palo Alto garage with $538; the garage is now a California historical landmark billed as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
Q 30Which company began in January 1996 as a research project by two Stanford PhD students?
Larry Page and Sergey Brin's project was called BackRub; the university held the patent on PageRank and made hundreds of millions from the shares it received.