The University of Bonn, officially the Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn, is a public research university located in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the Rhein-Universität on 18 October 1818 by Frederick William III, as the linear successor of the Kurkölnische Akademie Bonn which was founded in 1777. The University of Bonn offers many undergraduate and graduate programs in a range of subjects and has 544 professors. The University of Bonn is a member of the German U15 association of major research-intensive universities in Germany and has the title of "University of Excellence" under the German Universities Excellence Initiative.
Bert Sakmann is a German cell physiologist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Erwin Neher in 1991 for their work on "the function of single ion channels in cells," and the invention of the patch clamp. Bert Sakmann was Professor at Heidelberg University and is an Emeritus Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. Since 2008 he leads an emeritus research group at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology.
Gerd Faltings is a German mathematician known for his work in arithmetic geometry.
Friedrich Ernst Peter Hirzebruch ForMemRS was a German mathematician, working in the fields of topology, complex manifolds and algebraic geometry, and a leading figure in his generation. He has been described as "the most important mathematician in Germany of the postwar period."
Yuri Ivanovich Manin was a Russian mathematician, known for work in algebraic geometry and diophantine geometry, and many expository works ranging from mathematical logic to theoretical physics.
Ferenc Krausz is a Hungarian physicist working in attosecond science. He is a director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and a professor of experimental physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. His research team has generated and measured the first attosecond light pulse and used it for capturing electrons' motion inside atoms, marking the birth of attophysics. In 2023, jointly with Pierre Agostini and Anne L'Huillier, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Hélène Esnault is a French and German mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry.
Gisbert Wüstholz is a German mathematician internationally known for his fundamental contributions to number theory and arithmetic geometry.
Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain, known professionally as Ignacio Cirac, is a Spanish physicist. He is one of the pioneers of the field of quantum computing and quantum information theory. He is the recipient of the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award in technical and scientific research.
Stefan Walter Hell is a Romanian-German physicist and one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, and of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, both of which are in Germany. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014 "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy", together with Eric Betzig and William Moerner.
Reinhard Genzel is a German astrophysicist, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, a professor at LMU and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy", which he shared with Andrea Ghez and Roger Penrose. In a 2021 interview given to Federal University of Pará in Brazil, Genzel recalls his journey as a physicist; the influence of his father, Ludwig Genzel; his experiences working with Charles H. Townes; and more.
Thomas K. Henning is a German astrophysicist. He was a director at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy between 2001 and 2024. Henning is an expert in the field of star and planet formation.
Matthias Kreck is a German mathematician who works in the areas of Algebraic Topology and Differential topology. From 1994 to 2002 he was director of the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics and from October 2006 to September 2011 he was the director of the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics at the University of Bonn, where he is currently a professor.
Peter Scholze is a German mathematician known for his work in arithmetic geometry. He has been a professor at the University of Bonn since 2012 and director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics since 2018. He has been called one of the leading mathematicians in the world. He won the Fields Medal in 2018, which is regarded as the highest professional honor in mathematics.
Anna Katharina Wienhard is a German mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry, and especially the use of higher Teichmüller spaces to study the deformation theory of symmetric geometric structures. She is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences.
Thomas Lengauer is a German computer scientist and computational biologist.
Martin Grötschel is a German mathematician known for his research on combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, and operations research. From 1991 to 2012 he was Vice President of the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) and served from 2012 to 2015 as ZIB's President. From 2015 to 2020 he was President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW).
Manfred Theodor Reetz is a German chemist and professor of organic chemistry, who served as director of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research from 1991 until 2011. His research focuses on directed evolution, enzymes in organic chemistry, and stereoselective biocatalysis.
Wolfgang P. Baumeister is a German molecular biologist and biophysicist. His research has been pivotal in the development of Cryoelectron tomography.
Cothenius Medal is a medal awarded by the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina for outstanding scientific achievement during the life of the awardee. The medal was created to honour Christian Andreas Cothenius, who was the personal physician to Frederick the Great. In 1743, Cothenius became a fellow of the Leopoldina, later president of the learned society that had been created by Emperor Leopold I. When Cothenius died, he left a sum of money in his will to the society with the condition that the interest on the money should be used to award a gold medal, every two years by answering a question in medicine whereby some new truth could be established. Up until 1864, the award came with a prize but was then converted into an award for the promotion of research over the whole period of a person's life. Each medal bears the Latin inscription "Praemium virtutis salutem mortalium provehentibus sancitum".
