Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich or LMU; German: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. Originally established as the University of Ingolstadt in 1472 by Duke Ludwig IX of Bavaria-Landshut, it is Germany's sixth-oldest university in continuous operation.[n 1]
In 1800, the university was moved from Ingolstadt to Landshut by King Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria when the city was threatened by the French, before being transferred to its present-day location in Munich in 1826 by King Ludwig I of Bavaria. In 1802, the university was officially named Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität by King Maximilian I of Bavaria in honor of himself and Ludwig IX.[2]
LMU is currently the second-largest university in Germany in terms of student population; in the 2018/19 winter semester, the university had a total of 51,606 matriculated students. Of these, 9,424 were freshmen, while international students totalled 8,875 or approximately 17% of the student population. As for the operating budget, the university records in 2018 a total of 734.9 million euros in funding without the university hospital; with the university hospital, the university has a total funding amounting to approximately 1.94 billion euros.[3]
As of 2023, the University of Munich is associated with 44 Nobel laureates. Among these were Wilhelm Röntgen, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn and Thomas Mann.
Notable alumni, faculty and researchers include Pope Benedict XVI, Rudolf Peierls, Josef Mengele, Richard Strauss, Walter Benjamin, Joseph Campbell, Muhammad Iqbal, Marie Stopes, Wolfgang Pauli, Bertolt Brecht, Max Horkheimer, Karl Loewenstein, Carl Schmitt, Gustav Radbruch, Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Bloch and Konrad Adenauer. LMU has recently been conferred the title of "University of Excellence" under the German Universities Excellence Initiative, and is a member of U15 as well as the LERU.
Academics[edit]
Fields of study[edit]
Despite the Bologna Process which saw the demise of most traditional academic-degree courses such as the Diplom and Magister Artium in favour of the more internationally known Bachelors and Masters system, the University of Munich continues to offer more than 100 areas of study with numerous combinations of majors and minors.[10]
In line with the university's internationalisation as a popular destination for tertiary studies, an increasing number of courses mainly at the graduate and post-graduate levels are also available in English to cater to international students who may have little or no background in the German language.[11] Some notable subject areas which currently offer programmes in English include various fields of psychology, physics as well as business and management.[12]
Blake Ragsdale Van Leer, United States Army officer and president of Georgia Institute of Technology
The alumni of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich played a major role in the development of quantum mechanics. Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory and Nobel laureate in Physics in 1918, was an alumnus of the university. Founders of quantum mechanics such as Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and others were associated with the university.
Most recently, to honor the Nobel laureate in Chemistry Gerhard Ertl, who worked as a professor at the University of Munich from 1973 to 1986, the building of the Physical Chemistry was named after him.
Pakistani philosopher and poet Sir Muhammad Iqbal, regarded as the "Poet of the East" and "The Thinker of Pakistan", earned his PhD degree from the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich in 1908. Working under the guidance of Friedrich Hommel, Iqbal published his doctoral thesis in 1908, entitled The Development of Metaphysics in Persia.[37][38][39][40]
The anti-Nazi resistance White Rose was based in this university.[41]
