Biography | Gordon Moore — The Engineering Laboratory Dedicated on This Quad in His Name

On 9 January 1996 Caltech dedicated the Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering.

Moore had taken his Ph.D. on this campus in 1954.

By the dedication he was chairman of Intel and chairman of Caltech's board of trustees, a post he held from 1993 to 2000.

The building is 90,000 square feet, red tile and porticoes, in the campus Mediterranean style.

Neptune Thomas Davis designed it.

Swinerton and Walberg built it.

Intel equipped teaching rooms with then-new Pentium machines.

The labs were meant for communications, signal processing, micromachining, and the first computation-and-neural-systems program of its kind.

Five years later, in 2001, Gordon and Betty Moore added a combined $600 million to Caltech — $300 million of their own and $300 million from the foundation they had created in 2000.

At the time it was the largest gift an American university had received.

Moore died on 24 March 2023 at his home in Waimea, Hawaii.

Burial details were not published.

The house is private and is not pinned.

What a visitor can walk into is this laboratory, still operating under their names, a short walk from the Gates chemistry court where the doctorate began.

The foundation they left continues the conservation and science grants that occupied his last decades.

The forecast that carries his name is an industry slogan.

The building is the part that stays on a map.

Photo: Antony-22, May 2013, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons.