Purdue University

Purdue University was founded in 1869 with substantial financing provided by industrialist John Purdue. Its purpose was to train students in agriculture and engineering. The school officially opened for business in 1874 and grew quickly.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Purdue had been organized into five schools: agriculture, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering, and pharmacy. Later, schools of education and home economics were added. An early attempt at creating a medical school was later abandoned.

In other respects, Purdue was spectacularly successful. By 1925 the university was home to the largest number of engineering students in the US. It remained the nation’s largest engineering school for the next half-century.

Today, Purdue operates four satellite campuses: in Hammond, Fort Wayne, Columbus, and Indianapolis. Overall, the Purdue system has a student body approaching 75,000 souls.

Purdue is associated with 13 Nobel Prize winners, including:

• Physicists, Ben Roy Mottelson, Edward Mills Purcell, Julian Schwinger & Wolfgang Pauli
• Chemists, Ei-ichi Negishi, Herbert C. Brown & Akira Suzuki
• Economist, Vernon L. Smith

In addition, the Turing Award winning computer scientist, Alan J. Perlis, spent time here as a researcher.

Among other prominent Purdue-connected individuals, we may note the following:

• Astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Roger Chaffee & Eugene Cernan
• Heroic airline pilot, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger
• Mathematicians, Andrew Majda, Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar & Feydoon Shahidi
• Computer scientists, Mikhail Atallah, Markus Kuhn & Jill Zimmerman
• Computer software developer, Sanjiva Weerawarana
• Physicist, Albert Overhauser
• Chemist, C.N.R. Rao
• Chemical engineer, Rakesh Agrawal
• Molecular biologists, Seymour Benzer & Ronald Breaker
• Microbiologist, Rita Colwell
• Nanotechnology pioneers, Supriyo Datta & James Tour
• Physiologist, Leslie Geddes
• Economist, Hugo Sonnenschein
• Anthropologist, Peter Peregrine
• Novelist and playwright, Booth Tarkington
• Actors, George Peppard & Kenneth Choi
• Stand-up comic, Jim Gaffigan
• Photographer, Margaret Bourke-White