Herbert Hoover
Let’s overlook a grim Hoover namesake born of the 31st president’s Depression-era tenure—Hoovervilles, or shantytowns—in favor of Hooverball, a fitness game devised by the White House physician and played daily by Hoover, Class of 1895. Players “toss” a 6-pound ball over an 8-foot volleyball net.
Sally Ride
NASA’s lunar GRAIL mission ended in December 2012 with the programmed crash of the twin spacecraft Ebb and Flow on a 7,920-foot mountain near the crater Goldschmidt. NASA named the Sally K. Ride Impact Site after the late Ride, MS ’75, PhD ’78, the nation’s first woman in space and a member of the GRAIL mission.
Ray Dolby
Ray Dolby’s noise-reduction technology improved studio recording, then consumer cassette taping, and it ultimately led to Dolby Stereo and surround sound, garnering him two Academy Awards for technical achievement and a National Medal of Technology. Dolby, ’57, died in 2013, by which time his company, Dolby Labs, held 50 U.S. patents.
Irmgard Flügge-Lotz
Stanford’s first female engineering professor was an expert in aerodynamics who in 1931 solved an equation for calculating the lift force on an aircraft wing (the Lotz method). After leaving Nazi Germany, she and her husband, Wilhelm Flügge, joined Stanford’s engineering faculty in 1948; she became a full professor in 1960.
