Stanford University - Quad Yearbook (Palo Alto, CA)

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Wc asked some of our teachers to share with us a thought or two as we left. Here are their responses. Once, in the early days of the airmail service, Antoine de Saint-Exupery's plane was forced down upon the flat top of a high truncated cone far out in the Spanish Sahara. The remarkably stcen sides, great height, and remoteness of the place made likely that no human or beast had ever stepped on that high circle of virgin earth. As de Saint-Exupery walked over the whitened, sun-bleached pebbles and fossil shells, nc stumbled on a rounded black stone- a meteorite—and then another, and suddenly realized that he was in fact the first human witness at that place to a “miserly rain from the stars. Recently, I talked with a distinguished mathematician who recounted the time years ago when, working quietly and alone, he had suddenly seen the proof to a complex problem that had remained a puzzle for decades. The steps of the proof fell into place and the beauty of the relationship revealed itself. My friend said it was just too much trouble to write all of the background and steps into a form for publication. Years later, he was perusing a newly-published mathematical journal and there was the proof—discovered and described by another. My friend smiled to himself for lie knew that he had been there too, years before, when he had felt that unique inner satisfaction that comes from being where no human mind had been before. And, now he felt a special kinship for his codiscoverer for they had followed the same paths in reaching their goal. The university education you are completing docs not necessarily instill the special creativity that took my friend and his fellow mathematician to a forefront of human knowledge. But that education should have helped to kindle in you an awareness and sensitivity to aspects of the world and life that might otherwise pass unnoticed. That is the great priviledge you derive from these years at Stanford-the opportunity to see life from a special perspective. Don't miss your “rain from the stars. Norman Wessells 18

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Gordon Craig The Class of 1979 and I are leaving Stanford together. “Being at Stanford-' is the one thing we all share. You an- graduating, and I am retiring from a real international university. It was not so when I came here in 1953, well before most of you were horn. Stanford was then a good university, but I am one of those privileged to sec it grow into a ({real one. How did that come about? Today when there is widespread indifference towards, suspicion of. and even downright hostility to so many of our vital social and governmental institutions, an answer to that question is important for our own attitudes and conduct as citizens. There are of course many reasons: the dedicated work of staff and faculty, the faith and generosity of benefactors. But above all, I believe, it was our general acceptance of intelligent and visionary leadership, most notably in the person of Chancellor J. E. Wallace Sterling. To echo his familiar words to earlier graduating classes: “Coodbyc and good luck. 19