I arrived on the Stanford University campus in September of 1958.  The first two years there all engineering students pretty much took the same courses.   According to this historic view  of the Stanford Chemical Engineering Department, in 1960, Professor David Mason got a Ford Foundation grant to begin the program.  Those below have served as department chair: Mason was chairman of the department when in our junior year he rushed into one of our ChE classes and proudly announced that we had gained accreditation.  First, I did not know that I was in the very first class, and second, I always thought we were already accredited.  Same for the rest of my classmates.  Informally, there were 75 or so of us who had selected chemical engineering as their major in our freshman year.  When I graduated in 1962, there were only 8 of us.  Ten years later, Stanford ranked #1 in all the chemical engineering departments of the country.  For the record,  U.S. News and World Report  still has Stanford

Just another Sunday musing today, reflecting on my life full of miracles.  The greatest was being born on 6 September 1940.  What were the odds? The average male produces  2 trillion sperms  in a lifetime.   The average female produces 500 eggs in a lifetime. Multiplying the two, and you get one chance in a quadrillion for me to have been born. And that's just only because my mother and father got together. Incidentally, the longer odds of this happening can be viewed in a  TedX talk by Mel Robbins.   He says:  1 in 400 trillion. And another view .  Essentially, we're all miracles. There have been  117 billion miracles  since the beginning of us. My childhood was mundane and totally uneventful.  I lived just to the right of that tall building on the right, in a day when there were no tall buildings.  Nothing much happened until I got into high school.  As a sophomore at McKinley High School (p hoto to the left ) in Honolulu, the odds on my getting accepted by one of the better