“Miss Lou Henry entered Stanford and the geology laboratories,” Herbert Hoover said of a woman he assisted as an upperclassman.  “This call to duty was stimulated by her whimsical mind, her blue eyes, and a broad grinnish smile.”  They married five years afterward.¹

Herbert Clark Hoover was born on August 10, 1874.  The second of three children, he was orphaned when both of his parents died before his ninth birthday, after which he moved to live with an aunt and uncle in Oregon.  As a teenager, Hoover developed an interest in mathematics that in 1891 helped him become one of the students admitted to the first freshman class at Stanford University. Continue reading →