University of Bonn

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Image:University-bonn 2005-11-18.jpg

The main building from the Hofgarten at dusk. The spires of the Münsterkirche are visible in the background.

The University of Bonn (German: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn am Rhein) was founded on October 18, 1818, by the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III, who had been ruling the Rhineland as a part of Prussia since 1815.

The university's forerunner was the Academy of the last Cologne Kurfürst (Prince-elector), which he had founded in 1777, and which had been turned into a university in 1786. A mere decade later, the first university became a victim of the radical change brought about by the French Revolution.

The new Rhenish Friedrich-Wilhelm-University was founded in the spirit of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Idealism and the Enlightenment dominated the age. Because of the open zeitgeist of the time, the alma mater on the Rhine attracted famous men like August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Ernst Moritz Arndt, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Heinrich Hertz, to name a few.

Pope Benedict XVI was a professor of fundamental theology at the University of Bonn from 1959 until 1963.

Today, the university has about 30,000 students, making it one of the largest German universities. Each year, it has about 5,500 international students from 130 nations.

The University of Bonn does not have a centralised campus. The main building only accommodates the Theological and Philosophical faculties as well as the administration; the other faculties are situated in various parts of the city of Bonn.

The university is divided into seven faculties, which consist of various seminars, institutes and hospitals. The faculties are:

Catholic-Theological Faculty
Protestant-Theological Faculty
Law and Economics Faculty
Faculty of Medicine
Philosophical Faculty
Mathematics and Natural Science Faculty
Agricultural Faculty

Bonn Nobel prize laureates

To date, four nobel prizes have been awarded to scientists and scholars of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn:

Philipp Lenard: physics 1905
Otto Wallach: chemistry 1910
Wolfgang Paul: physics 1989
Reinhard Selten: economics 1994.

After the Federal Government's decision to move the capital of Germany from Bonn to Berlin, the city of Bonn received generous compensation from the Federal Government, under the Bonn-Berlin-Treaty. A large amount of the money was spent on the foundation of three leading research institutions: