The University of California, Berkeley (also known as UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, and by other names, see below) is the oldest and flagship campus of the ten-campus University of California system. Founded in 1868, the campus is located in Berkeley, California, occupying about 200 acres on a wooded slope, plus an additional 1000 acres (4 km²) of largely undeveloped land in the Berkeley Hills overlooking San Francisco Bay.
Berkeley physicists played a key role in developing the atomic bomb during WWII and the hydrogen bomb soon afterwards, and the University has managed the nation’s two principal nuclear weapons labs (now also used for more peaceful research) at Livermore and Los Alamos ever since. Berkeley scientists invented the cyclotron, discovered the anti-proton, played a key role in developing the laser, explained the processes underlying photosynthesis, isolated the polio virus, designed experiments that confirmed Bell’s Theorem, and discovered numerous elements, including Seaborgium, Plutonium, Berkelium, Lawrencium and Californium. Berkeley computer scientists are also credited with creating BSD. But Berkeley faculty have a no less distinguished record in fields outside the sciences as well, including four Fields Medal winners in mathematics, and nine recipients of the prestigious James S. McDonnell Foundation award.
Berkeley still enjoys a certain notoriety for its history of student activism. The Free Speech Movement (1964), a protest that began when the university tried to remove political pamphleteers from campus, and the People’s Park riots (1969) were part of a wave of international student protest that took place during the 1960s, associated with an accompanying “hippie” counterculture. For all of its student activism and rebellious history, however, the Berkeley campus is remarkably serene, with numerous quiet, green areas on campus and many architecturally distinguished buildings.
Website: www.berkeley.edu