Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 12:45, 21 April 2003

The University of California at Berkeley (UCB or Cal Berkeley) is the original campus of the University of California, situated in Berkeley, overlooking the Golden Gate in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Chartered in 1868, the University gained notoriety worldwide nearly a century later for the student body's active protests against American involvement in the Vietnam War. This period of social unrest on campus could be traced to the Free Speech Movement, which originated on the Berkeley campus in 1964 and inspired the political and moral outlook of a generation. On a lighter cultural note, The Graduate, a seminal novel and movie of the era, was filmed on location at the university and nearby buildings in 1966.

Through the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Berkeley campus enjoyed a golden age in the physical, chemical and biological sciences. During that period, researchers affiliated with the campus discovered all the chemical_elements heavier than Uranium, garnering a number of Nobel Prizes for these efforts along the way. Two of the elements, Berkelium and Californium, were named in honor of the university. Another two, Lawrencium and Seaborgium, were named in honor of faculty members Ernest O. Lawrence and Glenn T. Seaborg. The University administers the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Perhaps befitting a place which spawned the Free Speech Movement, Cal Berkeley also nurtured a number of key technologies associated with the early development of the Internet and the Open Source Software movement. The original Berkeley Software Distribution, commonly known as BSD Unix, was assembled in 1977 by Bill Joy as a PhD student in the computer science department. PostgreSQL emerged from faculty research begun in the late 1970s. SendMail was developed at Berkeley in 1981. BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain package) was written by a team of graduate students around the same time period. The Tcl programming language and the Tk GUI toolkit were developed by faculty member John Ousterhout in 1988. SPICE, a popular tool for IC Designers, was also invented at Berkeley under the direction of Professor Donald Pederson.

In an interesting example of the confluence of intellectual ideas, many of the arguments for the efficacy of Open Source software development, and of the Misplaced Pages project itself, find parallels in writings on urban planning and architecture published in the late 1970s by Christopher Alexander, a Berkeley professor of architecture. Across campus around that same time period, John Searle, a Berkeley professor of philosophy, introduced a celebrated critique of Artificial Intelligence using the metaphor of a Chinese Room.

The campus and surrounding community host a number of notable buildings by turn-of-the-20th-century architects Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan. Historic buildings on campus include Sproul Hall, Hearst Mining Building, the Faculty Club, Doe Library, Wheeler Hall, South Hall and Hearst Women's Gymnasium.

Cal Berkeley's sports teams compete as the California Golden Bears (often referred to as "Cal"). They participate in the NCAA's Division I-A, and in the Pacific Ten Conference. The annual football Big Game between the Bears and the Stanford Cardinal is one of the most important games on Cal's schedule.

Cal Berkeley's independent student-run newspaper is the the Daily Californian.

List of research projects conducted in there:

• Daedalus project - Combine intelligent adaptive applications with smart networking software that can multiplex connections over a wide variety of different networking technologies.
• Digital library project
• GiST - A Generalized Search Tree for Secondary Storage
• Harmonia research project - open interactive programming tools
• Sather - Object oriented language derivered from Eiffel programming language

See also : Soda Hall Cory Hall

Links

• The university's own website