One anecdote describes Thomas Hunt Morgan banning the Friden calculator from his department at Caltech, saying " Well, I am like a guy who is prospecting for gold along the banks of the Sacramento River in 1849.

The California Institute of Technology ( commonly referred to as Caltech ) is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States.

Although Caltech has a strong tradition of practical jokes and pranks, student life is governed by an honor code which allows faculty to assign take-home examinations.

It is within walking distance of Old Town Pasadena and the Pasadena Playhouse District and therefore the two locations are frequent getaways for Caltech students.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL ) is a federally funded research and development center ( FFRDC ) owned by NASA and operated as a division of Caltech through a contract between NASA and Caltech.

The JPL Director also serves as a Caltech Vice President and is responsible to the President of the Institute for the management of the Laboratory.

Caltech is a small four-year, highly residential research university with a slight majority in graduate programs.

Caltech is on the quarter system: the fall term starts in late September and ends before Christmas, the second term starts after New Years Day and ends in mid-March, and the third term starts in late March or early April and ends in early June.

The Institute launched the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech in 2006, the Keck Institute for Space Studies in 2008, and is also the current home for the Einstein Papers Project.

The Spitzer Science Center ( SSC ), part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center located on the Caltech campus, is the data analysis and community support center for NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

The program is open to both Caltech and non-Caltech undergraduate students.

Caltech's mascot is the Beaver, and its teams ( with the exception of the fencing team ) play in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, which Caltech co-founded in 1915.

The Caltech / Occidental College Orchestra is a full seventy-piece orchestra composed of students, faculty, and staff at Caltech and nearby Occidental College.

The theater program at Caltech is known as TACIT, or Theater Arts at the California Institute of Technology.

The playing of the Ride is such a strong tradition that the music was used during Apollo 17 to awaken Astronaut Harrison Schmitt, a Caltech alumnus.

Life in the Caltech community is governed by the Honor Code, which simply states: " No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community.

This was initially termed " splat cooling " by doctoral student W. Klement at Caltech, who showed that cooling rates on the order of millions of degrees per second is sufficient to impede the formation of crystals, and the metallic atoms become " locked into " a glassy state.

JPL is managed by the nearby California Institute of Technology ( Caltech ) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

JPL is a federally funded research and development center ( FFRDC ) managed and operated by Caltech under a contract from NASA.

The Keck Observatory is managed by the California Association for Research in Astronomy, a non-profit 501 ( c )( 3 ) organization whose board of directors includes representatives from Caltech and the University of California.

He joined Caltech alumnus William Shockley at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory division of Beckman Instruments, but left with the " traitorous eight ", when Sherman Fairchild agreed to back them and created the influential Fairchild Semiconductor corporation.

Caltech began as a vocational school founded in Pasadena in 1891 by local businessman and politician Amos G. Throop.

Under the leadership of Hale, Noyes and Millikan ( aided by the booming economy of Southern California ), Caltech grew to national prominence in the 1920s and concentrated on the development of Roosevelt's " Hundredth Man ".

In 2010, Caltech, in partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and headed by Professor Nathan Lewis, established a DOE Energy Innovation Hub aimed at developing revolutionary methods to generate fuels directly from sunlight.

Goodhue's designs for Caltech were also influenced by the traditional Spanish mission architecture of Southern California.

Caltech was ranked 1st internationally in 2011 by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

The United States National Research Council released its latest Assessment of Research Doctorate Programs in 2010, and 23 of the 24 graduate programs of Caltech were ranked within the top four programs in the nation in their size quartile as determined by both the R95 and S95 rankings.

The two most famous in recent history are the changing of the Hollywood Sign to read " Caltech ", by judiciously covering up certain parts of the letters, and the changing of the scoreboard to read Caltech 38, MIT 9 during the 1984 Rose Bowl Game.

But the most famous of all occurred during the 1961 Rose Bowl Game, where Caltech students altered the flip-cards that were raised by the stadium attendees to display " Caltech ", and several other " unintended " messages.

Caltech pranks have been documented in three Legends of Caltech books, the most recent of which was edited by alumni Autumn Looijen ' 99 and Mason A. Porter ' 98 and published in May 2007.

Harvey Mudd today still maintains the highest rate of science and engineering Ph. D. production among all undergraduate colleges and second highest ( Caltech ranks second and MIT third ) compared to all universities and colleges, according to a 2008 report by the National Science Foundation.

From time to time, Mudders have been known to amuse themselves by pranking Caltech.

For example, in 1986, students from Mudd stole a memorial cannon from Fleming House at Caltech ( originally from the National Guard ) by dressing as maintenance people and carting it off on a flatbed truck for " cleaning.

On May 13, 1997, Baltimore was appointed president of the California Institute of Technology ( Caltech ).

Von Kármán was appointed to the position on October 23, 1944, and left Caltech in December 1944.

Caltech appointed attorney Grant Cooper to defend Qian.

He was appointed Professor of Astronomy at Caltech in 1942 and also worked as a research director / consultant for Aerojet Engineering Corporation ( 1943 – 1961 ) and staff member of Mount Wilson Observatory and Palomar Observatory for most of his career.

Everhart currently sits on the board of directors of Raytheon and is a trustee of Caltech.

Bren serves on the board of trustees at Caltech trustee, UC Irvine Foundation and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and is a Fellow with the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

The original founders included five Caltech graduate students in Computer Science ( Gary Clow, Doug Whiting, John Tanner, Mike Schuster and William Dally ), two engineers from industry ( Scott Karns and Robert Monsour ) and two board members from industry ( Robert Johnson of Southern California Ventures and Hugh Ness of Scientific Atlanta ).

* The HP 200LX was used on board the NASA Discovery OV103 Mission STS-95 ( the last mission of Senator John Glenn ) in an Electronic Nose ( E-Nose ) experiment ( the device was developed jointly by Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL ) and the California Institute of Technology ( Caltech )).

Page, former vice president of the First National Bank in Los Angeles, and chairman of the Caltech board of trustees from 1943 to 1954.

The Foundation also established links with the California Institute of Technology, with Nobel Prize-winning Caltech physicist Robert Millikan joining the board of the HBF in 1937.

After Gosney's death in 1942, Gosney's daughter Lois Castle and the HBF's board liquidated HBF with its funds going to form the Gosney research fund at the California Institute of Technology ( Caltech ) in 1943.