In 1934, Caltech was elected to the Association of American Universities, and the antecedents of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech continues to manage and operate, were established between 1936 and 1943 under Theodore von Kármán.

During World War II, Caltech was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission.

In the 1950s – 1970s, Caltech was the home of Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman, whose work was central to the establishment of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Caltech undergraduates have historically been so apathetic to politics that there has been only one organized student protest in January 1968 outside the Burbank studios of NBC, in response to rumors that NBC was to cancel Star Trek.

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

Caltech was ranked as the best university in the world in two categories: Engineering & Technology and Physical Sciences.

Caltech was also found to have the highest score for per-capita performance in that ranking.

Caltech was found to offer the highest return of investment of college education, at $ 1, 713, 000 over a 30-year period, according to the same study.

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.

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.

A " sold " banner was hung on front of the MIT dome building and a " Welcome to Caltech East: School of the Humanities " banner over the Massachusetts Avenue Entrance.

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.

Conversely, JPL, through the Caltech lawyers representing the laboratory, allege that Coppedge's termination was simply due to budget cuts and his demotion from team lead was because of harassment complaints and from on-going conflicts with his co-workers.

This story was called " Instantané pour Caltech ".

Varga was visiting Olga Taussky-Todd and John Todd at Caltech.

His early work was done on mainframes at III, JPL, and Caltech.

The Infrared Radiometer ( IRR ) team was led by Professor Gerald Neugebauer from the California Institute of Technology ( Caltech ).

The term " Moore's law " was coined around 1970 by the Caltech professor, VLSI pioneer, and entrepreneur Carver Mead in reference to a statement by Gordon E. Moore.

An aeronautical engineer by profession, De Camp conducted his undergraduate studies at the California Institute of Technology ( where his roommate was at one point noted rocket fuel scientist John D. Clark ), and earned his Bachelor of Science degree from Caltech in Aeronautical Engineering 1930.

It was discovered on August 9, 1989, by Eleanor F. Helin ( Caltech ) on photographic plates taken at Palomar Observatory.

In 2012, the Center for World University Rankings ranked Caltech fifth in the world and fourth nationally in its CWUR World University Rankings.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities, a ranking with an emphasis on bibliometric data and scientific research, ranked Caltech 6th in the world and 5th in the U. S. for 2011.

U. S. News & World Report ranked Caltech as the 5th best university in the United States in their 2012 national college rankings, together with MIT, Stanford University, University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania.

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.

In a 2008 ranking of undergraduate programs by Forbes Magazine, Swarthmore was ranked fourth after Princeton, Caltech, and Harvard, respectively.

Albert Einstein arrived on the Caltech campus for the first time in 1931 to polish up his Theory of General Relativity, and he returned to Caltech subsequently as a visiting professor in 1932 and 1933.

Robertson's papers are at the Caltech archives ; there, in a letter Robertson offers Roe an interview within the first three months of 1949 ( as noted by Goranson on American Dialect Society list 5 / 9 / 2009 ).

Also in supernovae further nucleosynthesis processes can occur, especially the r process described by the B2FH paper and first calculated at Caltech by Seeger, Fowler and Clayton, in which the most neutron-rich isotopes of elements heavier than nickel are produced by rapid absorption of free neutrons created during the explosions.

He worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory before attending graduate school, first at Caltech and then the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he earned his doctorate in 1962.

He graduated first in his class of seven million at ' Caltech ' — Calcutta Technical Institute — going on to earn his doctorate at the Springfield Heights Institute of Technology ( S. H. I. T .).

The first National Medal of Science was awarded on February 18, 1963, for the year 1962 by President John F. Kennedy to Theodore von Kármán for his work at the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In 1943, Qian and two others in the Caltech rocketry group drafted the first document to use the name Jet Propulsion Laboratory ; it was a proposal to the Army for developing missiles in response to Germany's V-2 rocket.

In 1949, upon the recommendation of von Kármán, Qian became the first director of the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Center at Caltech.

The first reported metallic glass was an alloy ( Au < sub > 75 </ sub > Si < sub > 25 </ sub >) produced at Caltech by W. Klement ( Jr .), Willens and Duwez in 1960.

The r process described by the B2FH paper was first computed time-dependently at Caltech by Phillip Seeger, William A. Fowler and Donald D. Clayton, who achieved the first successful caricature of the r-process abundances and showed its evolution it time.

For example, in 2010, MIT had two of the top five scorers on the examination and seven of the top 24, while Caltech had just one student in the top five and only four in the top 24 ; yet Caltech took first place among teams while MIT took second.

In the 1930s a Caltech astronomer named Fritz Zwicky discovered over 100 supernovae ( exploding stars ) in other galaxies with this telescope and gathered the first evidence for dark matter.

He first described these results at a Conference at Caltech in 1960, and in a report, Feb. 1960, " A Preliminary Report on a General Theory of Inductive Inference.

He first published his results at a conference at Caltech in 1960, and in a report, Feb. 1960, " A Preliminary Report on a General Theory of Inductive Inference.

While working at Caltech, he first introduced metallic glasses made through rapid liquid cooling.

The world's first Neurochip, developed by Caltech researchers Jerome Pine and Michael Maher

Development of the first working neurochip was claimed by a Caltech team led by Jerome Pine and Michael Maher in 1997.

In 2007 astronomers at Caltech and the University of Cambridge announced the first results from a new hybrid Lucky Imaging and Adaptive Optics ( AO ) system.

A diketopiperazine was the first peptide to have its complete three-dimensional structure described, in work undertaken at Caltech by Robert Corey in the 1930s.

This effect is called PHIP (" Parahydrogen Induced Polarisation ") or PASADENA (" Parahydrogen and Synthesis allow dramatically enhanced nuclear alignment "-named this way as the first recognition of the effect was done by Bowers and Weitekamp of Caltech in Pasadena ) and has been utilized to study the mechanism of hydrogenation reactions, e. g.