Oh Knowledge Obscura

A small plate o’ University of Illinois trivia to help you pass that long Friday before the holiday break:

1. A fictional genius named Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai created the HAL 9000 in Urbana. HAL went on to learn how to sing and play chess before stealing the show in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Author Arthur C. Clarke said that he gave HAL a U. of I. origin for which reason?

altgeld2. On campus, the building named for John Peter Altgeld commemorates the man elected governor in 1893. Altgeld became a major Progressive Era figure, but his term of office began inauspiciously when the Clerk of the General Assembly had to read most of his inaugural address for him for which reason?

3. George E. Morrow and Manley Miles established the original ten Morrow Plots in 1876 to study practical problems faced by farmers. Mumford Hall, the Observatory, and lawn eventually took up seven of the plots, but Numbers Three, Four, and Five remain and can claim which superlative?

[Answers below]

 

 

 

 

1. One of Clarke’s math instructors later became a professor at Illinois
2. Altgeld was sick after a post-Election Day nervous breakdown
3. It is the longest continuously farmed plot of land in North American