Some didja-knows about Cornell's CS department (CUCS) or Cornell and their environs:

• As of 2021, it seems that Cornell is the institution that has the most undergraduate alumni winning the ACM Prize in Computing: Scott Aaronson ‘00, Sanjay Ghemalwat ‘87, Jon Kleinberg ‘93.
• As of 2020, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellows with Cornell connections include: four were Cornell undergrads (Dan Klein (CS), Bobby Kleinberg, Adam Siepel, Ryan Williams), at least one a Cornell PhD student (Stefano Ermon), two were Cornell postdocs (Regina Barzilay (CS), Josh Bongard, Jure Leskovec (CS)), and seven are or were CUCS faculty (including Bobby Christina Delimitrou, Kleinberg, Rafael Pass, Adam Siepel, Noah Snavely, David Steurer).
• Graduates of CU '08-'12 include faculty at MIT, Stanford, UPenn, UT-Austin
• Graduates of CUCS classes '94-'06 include faculty at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Penn, and Toronto.
• Graduates of the Cornell CS class of 1993 include three Sloan fellows, two MacArthur fellows, and a coinventor of Microsoft Surface.
• Cornell's team, including CS majors, was one of the top six in the Darpa Urban Challenge. Chronicle article
• Jason Rohrer, CUCS '01 (and a TA for me in CS481), was named one of Esquire Magazine's "Best and brightest 2008" for his work on emotional and artistic video games, and his game "Gravitation" won the Jury Prize at IndieCade 2008. Esquire article, New Yorker 2016 article
• As of 2019: Cornell is tied for #1, with Princeton, in number of winners of the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Awards. (For comparison, MIT has 3, and Stanford has 1)
• The three invited speakers for the 2009 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) all have Cornell degrees (two bachelors degrees from CUCS and a PhD from CU TAM)

• Cornell is the only university in the US with its own hydroelectric plant. (Cornell Alumni Magazine, March/April 2009)
• Once called "the first American university" by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.
  Today's Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation's first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League. (from http://www.cornell.edu/about/). More on the birth of an American university
• A Cornell ADVANCE report said that Cornell ranks third as the undergraduate institution where women engineering faculty were trained.
• The first woman to earn a Doctorate of Science at an American university, Caroline Baldwin Morrison, earned it in 1895 from Cornell.
• The only two women US Nobel laureates in literature, Pearl S. Buck and Toni Morrison, got their masters degrees from Cornell.

• Awards and mentions for Ithaca
• Feature on Ithaca in the New York Times
• Ithaca was number 3 for metropolitan areas per-capita production of Peace Corps volunteers, 2017 (press release)
• The Ithaca area scores high on the list for all US cities (admittedly, somewhat loosely defined, with the Ithaca region being broken up into several entities) with residents holding higher degrees