Knuth at Cornell
While searching for optimal ways to parallelize a transitive closure problem, I came across the following sentence by Donald Knuth:

"Due to the present supply and demand in computer science, I am fortunate enough to be able to pick just about any place I want to go; but there are several good places and it’s quite a dilemma to decide what I should do. I believe the four places that are now uppermost in my mind are Stanford, Cornell, Harvard, and Caltech (in that order). I expect to take about a year before I make up my mind, with Jill’s help"

I wonder how the world of Computer Science would have changed if Knuth (and Floyd) had not gone to Stanford (this is circa 1967). Oh well.