Technical University of Munich

The Technical University of Munich (TUM or TU Munich) (German: Technische Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, with additional campuses in Garching, Freising, Heilbronn and Singapore. A technical university that specializes in engineering, technology, medicine, and the applied and natural sciences, it is organized into 15 schools and departments, and supported by numerous research centers.

Technical University of Munich
Technische Universität München
Motto
Die unternehmerische Universität
Motto in English
The entrepreneurial university
TypePublic
Established1868 (1868)
FounderLudwig II of Bavaria
Academic affiliation
Budget€1,637.6 Million (2019)[1]
University: €976.7 Million Hospital: €660.8 Million
PresidentThomas Hofmann
(list of presidents)
Academic staff
594 professors
6,918 (other academic staff)[1]
Administrative staff
3,358 (without university hospital)[1]
Students45,356 (WS 2020/21)[1]
Address
Arcisstraße 21
, , ,
80333
,
48.149°N 11.567°E / 48.149; 11.567
CampusUrban
Colors  Blue,   White
Websitetum.de

A University of Excellence under the German Universities Excellence Initiative,[2] TUM is consistently ranked among the leading universities in the European Union[3] and its researchers and alumni include 16 Nobel laureates and 22 Leibniz Prize winners.[1]

History

19th century

The new building of the Polytechnische Schule München in 1869

In 1868, King Ludwig II of Bavaria founded the Polytechnische Schule München with Karl Maximilian von Bauernfeind as founding director. The new university had its premises at Arcisstraße, where it is still located today. At that time, around 350 students were supervised by 24 professors and 21 lecturers. The college was divided into six departments: The "General Department" (mathematics, natural sciences, humanities, law and economics), the "Engineering Department" (civil engineering and surveying), the "Building Construction Department" (architecture), the "Mechanical-Technical Department" (mechanical engineering), the "Chemical-Technical Department" (chemistry), and the "Agricultural Department".

In 1877, the Polytechnische Schule München became the Technische Hochschule München (TH München), and in 1901 it was granted the right to award doctorates. With an average of 2,600 to 2,800 students, the TH München was now Germany's largest technical university for a time, ahead of the TH Berlin.

20th century

The main building of the Technische Hochschule München in 1909
Lecture hall in the former Institute of Chemistry in 1909. An early version of the periodic table can be seen on the wall.

In 1906, Anna Boyksen became the first female student to enroll in electrical engineering, after the Bavarian government had allowed women to study at technical universities in the German Empire.

In 1913, Jonathan Zenneck became director of the newly created Physics Institute.

During the Weimar Republic, the TH München had to manage with scarce resources and was drawn into radical political struggles in the years of the November Revolution, the Great Depression, and Adolf Hitler's rise to power. In the winter semester of 1930/31, the National Socialist German Students' League became the strongest faction in the General Students' Committee (AStA) for the first time.

In Nazi Germany, the Führerprinzip was also imposed on the universities. The autonomy of the TH München was substantially restricted. In 1933, the newly passed Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service removed "non-Aryan" staff or those married to "non-Aryans" from their positions, together with politically "undesirable" professors. Jewish students no longer had equal rights and were not allowed to be enrolled after 1938.

During World War II, the TH München conducted large scale armaments research in support of the war effort. Notable professors during this time include aircraft designer Willy Messerschmitt and Walther Meissner. Basic research continued to be conducted at a high level in many institutes, as individual professors, staff members and students dared disobedience and obstruction. Nobel prize laureate Hans Fischer protected Jewish students from Nazi prosecution. He committed suicide shortly before the end of the war.[4]

Post World War II

The research reactor FRM I, nicknamed the atomic egg, has become a landmark of the city of Garching, even being featured in its coat of arms.

During the war, 80 percent of the university's facilities in Munich had been destroyed. Under these difficult conditions, teaching resumed in April 1946.

In 1956, the construction of a research reactor in Garching was the beginning of the Garching campus. In 1969, the physics department building was opened there, followed in 1977 by new buildings for the chemistry, biology and geoscience departments.

In 1967, a Faculty of Medicine was founded with campuses in Haidhausen (Rechts der Isar Hospital) and Schwabing. By 1968, the TH München comprised six faculties, 8,400 students, and 5,700 staff. In 1972, the Zentrale Hochschulsportanlage, a 45-hectare sports center, was built on the grounds of the 1972 Summer Olympics.

In 1970, the TH München was renamed to its present name Technische Universität München. When the Bavarian Higher Education Act came into force in 1974, the six faculties were replaced by eleven departments. In 1992, the field of computer science was established as an independent Department of Informatics, having previously been part of the Department of Mathematics since 1967.

21st century

The TUM campus in Garching with the Department of Mechanical Engineering to right

In 2002, TUM Asia was founded in Singapore, in cooperation with the Nanyang Technological University and the National University of Singapore. It was the first time that a German university had established a subsidiary abroad.

The Department of Sport and Health Sciences and the School of Management were established in 2002. The Weihenstephan departments were combined into the "Weihenstephan Centre of Life and Food Sciences" (WZW), which would later become the School of Life Sciences. With the establishment of the School of Education in 2009, the School of Governance in 2016 and the Department of Aerospace and Geodesy in 2018, the university comprises 15 schools and departments.

Since the inception of the German Universities Excellence Initiative in 2006, TUM has won every round of evaluation and the title University of Excellence.[2]

Campuses

TUM's academic faculties are divided amongst numerous campuses.

Munich

Aerial view of the main building (dark brown) in downtown Munich (2007)

The historic Main Campus (Stammgelände) in located in Maxvorstadt, the central borough of Munich. Today, the departments of Architecture, Civil, Geo and Environmental Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Schools of Management, Governance, Education are located here.

The TUM School of Medicine is located at the site of its university hospital, the Rechts der Isar Hospital, in the district of Haidhausen.

The TUM Department of Sport and Health Sciences is located in the Olympiapark, the former site of the 1972 Summer Olympics.

Garching

Aerial view of the TUM campus in Garching (2011)
Interior of the faculty building for the Departments of Mathematics and Informatics

The campus in Garching, located around 10 km north of Munich, has grown to become the largest TUM campus. In the last decades, the departments of Physics, Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering, Informatics and Mathematics have all relocated from their former buildings in the Main Campus. They have since been joined by numerous research institutes, including the Max Planck Institutes for Plasma Physics, Astrophysics, Extraterrestrial Physics and Quantum Optics, the Forschungsreaktor München II (FRM II), the headquarters of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, one of the fastest supercomputers in Europe.[5]

A landmark of the Garching campus is the Oskar von Miller Tower, a meteorological measurement tower with a height of 62 m. The Garching campus is connected to Munich by the Autobahn and the Munich U-Bahn. It has its own fire department.

Weihenstephan

The third TUM campus is located 35 km north of Munich in Weihenstephan, Freising. It hosts the School of Life Sciences.

Other locations

Additional TUM facilities are located in Ottobrunn (Department of Aerospace and Geodesy),[6] Straubing,[7] Heilbronn,[8] and Singapore.

TUM Asia

TUM operates a subsidiary in Singapore. In 2001, the German Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) – TUM Asia was founded in partnership with the National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological University, offering a range of Master's programs. In 2010, TUM Asia started offering Bachelor's degrees in collaboration with the Singapore Institute of Technology.

In 2010, TUM and the Nanyang Technological University founded TUMCREATE, a research platform for the improvement of Singapore's public transportation.[9]

Academics

Entrance to the Main Campus in Munich
The Werner von Siemens Auditorium Maximum on the Main Campus

Schools and departments

As a technical university, the university specializes in engineering, technology, medicine, and the applied and natural sciences. Compared to a Volluniversität (a universal university), it lacks the Geisteswissenschaften, including law and many branches of the social sciences.

As of 2020, the Technical University of Munich is organized into 15 schools and departments:[10]

School/department Discipline Location Students[1] ♀%
Department of Aerospace and Geodesy (LRG) Aerospace engineering, geodesy Ottobrunn 941 24%
Department of Architecture (AR) Architecture Munich 1,504 57%
Department of Civil, Geo and Environmental Engineering (BGU) Civil engineering, environmental engineering, earth science Munich 3,731 37%
Department of Chemistry (CH) Chemistry Garching 1,978 44%
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (EI) Electrical engineering, computer engineering Munich 4,160 20%
Department of Informatics (IN) Computer science Garching 7,347 21%
Department of Mechanical Engineering (MW) Mechanical engineering Garching 4,208 16%
Department of Mathematics (MA) Mathematics Garching 1,357 34%
School of Medicine (MED) Medicine Munich 2,180 63%
Department of Physics (PH) Physics Garching 1,993 25%
Department of Sport and Health Sciences (SG) Sports science, health sciences Munich 2,228 66%
School of Education (EDU) Teacher training, educational research Munich 1,422 58%
School of Governance (GOV) Governance Munich 723 49%
School of Management (WI) Business Munich 5,806 39%
School of Life Sciences (SoLS) Life sciences Freising 4,329 56%

Other institutions include the Rechts der Isar Hospital, the TUM Graduate School and the Bavarian School of Public Policy.

Research

TUM has operated two research reactors on its Garching campus, the egg-shaped FRM I from 1957–2000 and the FRM II (with the curved roof) since 2004.

The Technical University of Munich is one of the most research-focused universities in Europe. This claim is supported by relevant rankings, such as the funding ranking of the German Research Foundation and the research ranking of the Centre for Higher Education.[11]

Under the German Universities Excellence Initiative, TUM has obtained funding for multiple research clusters, including e-conversion (energy technology), MCQST (quantum mechanics), ORIGINS (astrophysics, biophysics and particle physics), and SYNERGY (neurology).[12]

In addition to the schools and departments, TUM has set up numerous research centers with external cooperation partners.[13]

Integrative research centers (IRCs) combine research with teaching.[13] They include the TUM Institute for Advanced Study (TUM-IAS), the Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), the Munich Data Science Institute (MDSI), the Munich School of Engineering (MSE), the Munich School of BioEngineering (MSB), and the Munich School of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MSRM).

Corporate research centers (CRCs) carry out research independently of the schools and departments, cooperating with industry partners for application-driven research.[13] They include the research reactor FRM II, the Center for Functional Protein Assemblies (CPA), the Catalysis Research Center (CRC), the Center for translational Cancer Research (TranslaTUM), the Walter Schottky Institute (WSI), the Hans Eisenmann-Zentrum for Agricultural Science, and the Institute for Food & Health (ZIEL).

Rankings

University rankings
Overall – Global & National
QS World 2021[14] 50  (1)
THE World 2021[15] 41  (2)
ARWU World 2020[16] 54  (2)
QS Employability  ()
THE Employability 2020[17] 12  (1)
By subject – Global & National
QS Engineering and Technology 2020[14] 25  (1)
THE Engineering and Technology 2021[15] 24  (1)
ARWU  ()
QS Natural Science 2020[14] 28  (1)
THE Physical Sciences 2021[15] 25  (2)
ARWU  ()
QS Life Sciences and Medicine 2020[14] 62  (3)
THE Life Sciences 2021[15] 46  (3)
ARWU  ()
QS  ()
THE Computer Science 2021[15] 14  (1)
ARWU  ()

TUM is ranked 1st in Germany in the fields of engineering and computer science, and within the top three in the natural sciences.[14][15][16]

In the 2021 QS World Rankings, TUM is worldwide ranked 25th in engineering and technology, 28th in the natural sciences, 36th in computer science, and 50th place overall. It is the highest ranked German university in those subject areas.[14]

In the 2021 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, TUM stands at 41st place worldwide and 2nd place nationwide. Worldwide, it ranks 14th in computer science, 24th in engineering and technology, and 25th in the physical sciences. It is the highest ranked German university in those subject areas.[15]

In the 2020 Academic Ranking of World Universities, TUM is ranked at 54th place in the world and 2nd place in Germany. In the subject areas of computer science & engineering and chemistry, TUM stands at 1st place in Germany.[16]

In the 2020 Global University Employability Ranking of the Times Higher Education World Rankings, TUM was ranked 12th in the world and 3rd in Europe.[17] TUM is ranked 7th overall in Reuters' 2019 European Most Innovative University ranking.[18]

The TUM School of Management is triple accredited by the European Quality Improvement System (EQUIS), the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and the Association of MBAs (AMBA).[19][20][21]

Partnerships

TUM has over 160 international partnerships, ranging from joint research activities to international study programs. Partners include:[22]

Through the Erasmus+ program and its international student exchange program TUMexchange, all TUM students are provided by opportunities to study abroad.[23]

Student life

As of winter semester 2020, 45,356 students are enrolled at TUM, of whom 36% are female and 34% are international students.[1]

Student initiatives

Various initiatives are run by students, including TEDxTUM, the TUM Speaker Series (past speakers having included Ban Ki-moon, Tony Blair, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt),[24] and IKOM, a career fair.[25]

A notable student group is the Workgroup for Rocketry and Space Flight (WARR), which won all SpaceX Hyperloop pod competitions.[26][27][28]

Student government

The Student Council is the main body for university-wide student representation. It elects the General Student Committee (AStA), which represents the professional, economic and social interests of the students, by the Bavarian Higher Education Act. Each school or department will also have a separate Departmental Student Council.

Every year, university elections are held to elect student representatives in the Senate (the university's highest academic authority) and in the faculty councils.[29]

Events

The Student Council organizes a number of annual festivals. TUNIX and GARNIX are week-long open air festivals held every summer. TUNIX is held at the Königsplatz near the Munich campus, while GARNIX is held at the Garching campus. GLÜHNIX is a christmas market held in front of the Department of Mechanical Engineering every December. MaiTUM is a Bavarian Maifest, held at the Main Campus in May each year.[25][30]

The Student Council also organizes numerous events, including the student-run TU Film cinema, the Hörsaal Slam, the Benefizkabarett, and the MeUP party.[30] Departmental Student Councils also organize their own events, such as Unity, esp, and the Brückenfest.

Campus life

The Zentrale Hochschulsportanlage (ZHS) is the largest university sports facility in Germany, offering hundreds of different sports programs.[25]

Music ensembles at TUM include the TUM Chamber Orchestra, the TUM Jazz Band, the TUM Choir, and the Symphonisches Ensemble München, a full-size symphony orchestra.[25]

Notable people

Heinrich Otto Wieland, professor at TUM from 1913–1921, won the 1927 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Carl von Linde, lecturer at the TH Munich, discovered the refrigeration cycle that led to the development of the modern refrigerator.

Nobel Prize laureates

16 Nobel Prize winners have studied, taught or researched at the TUM:

Scientists

See also

Notes and references

  1. "TUM Facts & figures". Technische Universität München. Retrieved 22 December 2020.
  2. "Final decisions in the German Excellence Strategy". Wissenschaftsrat.de.
  3. "TUM rated as best university in the EU". www.tum.de. Retrieved 1 July 2020.
  4. Pabst, p. 321–350
  5. "Das Garchinger Hochschul- und Forschungszentrum:". garching.de (in German). Retrieved 22 December 2020.
  6. "New Department of Aerospace, Aeronautics and Geodesy". Technical University of Munich. 21 September 2018. Retrieved 22 December 2020.
  7. ""Straubing in der ersten Liga"". Bayerischer Rundfunk (in German). 20 July 2017. Retrieved 22 December 2020.
  8. "Mega-endowment for TUM Campus Heilbronn". Technical University of Munich. 7 February 2018. Retrieved 22 December 2020.
  9. "About TUMCREATE". TUM CREATE. Retrieved 22 December 2020.
  10. "Organization of the university: TUM Governance". Technical University of Munich. Retrieved 22 December 2020.
  11. Förderatlas 2018 (PDF). Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. 2018.
  12. "Clusters of Excellence - Exzellenzstrategie". Technical University of Munich. Retrieved 22 December 2020.
  13. "Research Centers". Technical University of Munich. Retrieved 22 December 2020.
  14. "QS World University Rankings 2021". QS World University Rankings. 22 June 2020.
  15. "World University Rankings". Times Higher Education World University Rankings. 2 September 2020.
  16. "Academic Ranking of World Universities 2020". Academic Ranking of World Universities. Retrieved 3 September 2020.
  17. "Best universities for graduate jobs: Global University Employability Ranking 2020". Times Higher Education World University Rankings. 19 November 2020. Retrieved 28 December 2020.
  18. "Reuters Top 100: Europe's Most Innovative Universities 2019 announced". Reuters. 30 April 2019. Retrieved 28 December 2020.
  19. "EQUIS Accredited Schools". European Quality Improvement System. Retrieved 24 December 2020.
  20. "AACSB-Accredited Business Schools". Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Retrieved 24 December 2020.
  21. "Accredited Schools". Association of MBAs. Retrieved 24 December 2020.
  22. "International Partner Universities". Technical University of Munich. Retrieved 22 December 2020.
  23. "Study abroad". TUM Global & Alumni Office. Retrieved 22 December 2020.
  24. "TUM Speakers Series". Retrieved 23 December 2020.
  25. "Campus life". Technical University of Munich. Retrieved 22 December 2020.
  26. Boyle, Alan (27 August 2017). "Germany's WARR team wins SpaceX's Hyperloop II race with 201-mph pod run". GeekWire. US. Archived from the original on 25 September 2017. Retrieved 26 September 2017.
  27. "WARR Hyperloop pod hits 284 mph to win SpaceX competition". The Verge. 18 July 2018. Archived from the original on 29 July 2018. Retrieved 30 July 2018.
  28. "Team TUM wins SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition with record 288 mph top speed". TechCrunch. Retrieved 28 July 2019.
  29. "University elections on July 28, 2020". Technical University of Munich. Retrieved 22 December 2020.
  30. "Unsere Veranstaltungen - Studentische Vertretung". Technical University of Munich Student Council (in German). Retrieved 22 December 2020.

Bibliography

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