Short answers, pulled from the story.
UC Irvine began operations on the 4th of October 1965, one year after U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson dedicated the campus on the 20th of June 1964 before a crowd of 15,000 people. The campus opened with 1,589 students, 241 staff members, 119 faculty, and 43 teaching assistants.
UC Irvine takes its name from James Irvine, a landowner who administered the 94,000 acre Irvine Ranch, not from the city of Irvine, which was not incorporated until 1971. The Irvine Company had sold 1,000 acres of that ranch to the University of California for one dollar in 1960.
UC Irvine admitted 35,964 of 124,231 applicants for fall 2025, an acceptance rate of 28.94 percent, with a median weighted GPA of 4.19 among incoming freshmen.
Five people affiliated with UC Irvine have won the Nobel Prize, including three faculty members, one postdoctoral scholar, and one alumnus. They include Frank Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina in Chemistry in 1995, Frederick Reines in Physics in 1995, Irwin Rose in Chemistry in 2004, and alumnus David MacMillan in Chemistry in 2021.
UC Irvine has won 28 national championships across nine sports, including men's volleyball titles in 2007, 2009, 2012, and 2013, and men's water polo titles in 1970, 1982, and 1989.
UC Irvine's Middle Earth housing complex draws every hall name from J.R.R. Tolkien's legendarium, including Hobbiton, Rivendell, and Bag End from its first construction phase beginning in 1974. Its newest towers, opened in 2019, are named Telperion and Laurelin after the Two Trees of Valinor.