Longboard,
Sorry for the extended radio silence. Al covered a lot of ground so I'll add a few points.
First, Frederick Law Olmsted did not design our campus. His sons continued his Landscape Architecture practice and were hired as consultants for a time. However, the campus is indeed beautiful and earned the American Society of Landscape Architects Centennial Medal in 1999. Three university campuses were honored; Yale, UVA, and ISU. With regard to the Manhattan project; iirc the enrichment of the uranium used occurred on campus in Ames. We got the nickname "Cyclones" from the sports page of the Chicago Tribune when in 1896 we took a road trip to Evanston and beat the dogshit out of Northwestern (0-31?). The headline made a reference to the ISU team blowing into town like an Iowa cyclone. Tornado season had been particularly active that year... The Atanasoff-Berry computer was designed and built at ISU. It was the first electronic computer.
The football team is probably best known for it's former coaches including; Pop Warner, Johnny Majors, Earle Bruce, Jimmy Johnson, Jackie Sherill, Pete Carroll, John Fox, and one Tom Herman.
You'll be glad to know we've got a couple industrial design grads at Vans. Saw some pics of them reviewing projects last semester.