[17][18][19] Berkeley students compete in thirty varsity athletic sports, and the university is one of eighteen full-member institutions in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC).

[30] Frederick Billings, a trustee of the College of California, suggested that a new campus site north of Oakland be named in honor of Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley.

[35] Beginning in 1891, Phoebe Apperson Hearst funded several programs and new buildings and, in 1898, sponsored an international competition in Antwerp, where French architect Émile Bénard submitted the winning design for a campus master plan.

[45][46] In particular, during World War II and following Glenn Seaborg's then-secret discovery of plutonium, Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory began to contract with the U.S. Army to develop the atomic bomb.

In 2015, Berkeley and its sister campus, UCSF, established the Innovative Genomics Institute to develop CRISPR gene editing, and, in 2020, an anonymous donor pledged $252 million to help fund a new center for computing and data science.

[95] Berkeley has also benefited from benefactors beyond its alumni ranks, notable among which are Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan; Vitalik Buterin, Patrick Collison, John Collison, the Ron Conway family, Daniel Gross, Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, along with Jane Street principals; BP; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, billionaire Sir Li Ka-Shing, Israeli-Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, Thomas and Stacey Siebel, Sanford and Joan Weill, and professor Gordon Rausser ($50 million gift in 2020).

[99] There are 1,789 full-time and 886 part-time faculty members among the university's academic enterprise which is organized into fifteen colleges and schools that comprise 180 departments and 80 interdisciplinary units offering over 350 degree programs.

The Museum of Paleontology, found in the lobby of the Valley Life Sciences Building, showcases a variety of dinosaur fossils including a complete cast of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

[187] The winner was Frenchman Émile Bénard, who refused to personally supervise the implementation of his plan and the task was subsequently given to architecture professor John Galen Howard.

Other notable architects and firms whose work can be found in the campus and surrounding area are Bernard Maybeck[190] (Faculty Club); Julia Morgan (Hearst Women's Gymnasium and Julia Morgan Hall); William Wurster (Stern Hall); Moore Ruble Yudell (Haas School of Business); Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (C.V. Starr East Asian Library), and Diller Scofidio + Renfro (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive).

The south fork enters a culvert upstream of the recreational complex at the mouth of Strawberry Canyon and passes beneath California Memorial Stadium before appearing again in Faculty Glade.

The Big "C" has its roots in an early 20th-century campus event called "Rush," which pitted the freshman and sophomore classes against each other in a race up Charter Hill that often developed into a wrestling match.

It was eventually decided to discontinue Rush and, in 1905, the freshman and sophomore classes banded together in a show of unity to build "the Big C."[196] Students invented the college football tradition of card stunts.

Founded in 1871, The Daily Cal became independent in 1971 after the campus administration fired three senior editors for encouraging readers to take back People's Park.

The program offers around 150 courses on a vast range of subjects that appeal to the student community, including classes on the Rubik's Cube, blockchain, web design, metamodernism, cooking, Jewish art, 3D animation, and bioprinting.

[215] The campus is home to several a cappella groups, including Drawn to Scale, Artists in Resonance, Berkeley Dil Se, the UC Men's Octet, the California Golden Overtones, DeCadence, and Noteworthy.

PCCJF brought jazz artists including Hubert Laws, Sonny Rollins, Freddie Hubbard, and Ed Shaughnessy to the Berkeley campus as performers.

Alumni have also served in many supranational posts, notable among which are President of the World Bank (Robert McNamara, BS); Deputy Prime Minister of Spain and managing director of the International Monetary Fund (Rodrigo Rato, MBA); executive director of UNICEF (Ann Veneman, MPP); member of the European Parliament (Bruno Megret, MS); and judge of the World Court (Joan Donoghue, JD).

Nobel laureate Glenn T. Seaborg (PhD 1937) collaborated with Albert Ghiorso (BS 1913) to discover twelve chemical elements, such as americium, berkelium, and californium.

Harvey Itano (BS 1942) conducted breakthrough work on sickle cell anemia that marked the first time a disease was linked to a molecular origin.

[256] National Medal of Science laureate Chien-Shiung Wu (PhD 1940), often known as the "Chinese Madame Curie," disproved the Law of Conservation of Parity for which she was awarded the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics.

[257] Kary Mullis (PhD 1973) was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his role in developing the polymerase chain reaction,[258] a method for amplifying DNA sequences.

[265] Peter Smith (BS 1969) was the principal investigator and project leader for the NASA robotic explorer Phoenix,[266] which physically confirmed the presence of water on the planet Mars for the first time.

In 1977, a graduate student in the computer science department named Bill Joy (MS 1982) assembled[276] the original Berkeley Software Distribution, commonly known as BSD Unix.

[277] Eric Allman (BS 1977, MS 1980) created SendMail, a Unix mail transfer agent that delivers about twelve percent of the email in the world.

Billionaire alumni include Gordon Moore (Intel founder), James Harris Simons (Renaissance Technologies), Masayoshi Son (SoftBank),[282] Jon Stryker (Stryker Medical Equipment),[283] Eric Schmidt (former Google Chairman) and Wendy Schmidt, Michael Milken, Bassam Alghanim, Kutayba Alghanim,[284] Charles Simonyi (Microsoft), Cher Wang (HTC), Robert Haas (Levi Strauss & Co.), Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor (Interbank, Peru),[285] Fayez Sarofim, Daniel S. Loeb, Paul Merage, David Hindawi, Orion Hindawi, Bill Joy (Sun Microsystems founder), Victor Koo, Tony Xu (DoorDash), Lowell Milken, Nathaniel Simons and Laura Baxter-Simons, Liong Tek Kwee and Liong Seen Kwee,[286] Elizabeth Simons and Mark Heising,[287] Oleg Tinkov, and Alice Schwartz.

[290] Novelist Robert Penn Warren (MA 1927) won three Pulitzer Prizes,[291] including one for his novel All the King's Men, which was later made into an Academy Award-winning[292] movie.

[298] Irving Stone (BA 1923) wrote the novel Lust for Life, which was later made into an Academy Award-winning film of the same name starring Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh.

Terry McMillan (BA 1986) wrote How Stella Got Her Groove Back, which was later made into a film of the same name starring Oscar-nominated actress Angela Bassett.

James Schamus (BA 1982, MA 1987, PhD 2003) has collaborated on screenplays with Oscar-winning director Ang Lee on the Academy Award-winning movies Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain.