The Technical University of Munich grew from a polytechnic founded by Ludwig II
King Ludwig II of Bavaria founded it in 1868 as a polytechnic school with about 350 students. Today the Technical University of Munich teaches nearly 52,000, counts 19 Nobel laureates among its researchers and alumni, and has won every round of Germany's excellence competition since it began in 2006.
The original school opened on Arcisstraße, where the university still has its main campus, with six departments ranging from architecture to agriculture. It became a Technische Hochschule in 1877, gained the right to award doctorates in 1901, and for a time was Germany's largest technical college, ahead of Berlin. Anna Boyksen enrolled in electrical engineering in 1906 as its first woman student, and in 1927 Martha Schneider-Bürger graduated as the first German woman civil engineer. The present name dates from 1970.
Its darkest chapter came under National Socialism. Nazi students dominated student politics by 1930, and after 1933 Jewish and politically unwelcome staff were dismissed. An agricultural professor, Heinz Henseler, ran a seminar from 1940 on how to Germanize Polish and Russian land, and university farms used forced labour and prisoners of war. Some resisted: the Nobel chemist Hans Fischer shielded Jewish students. By the war's end some 80 per cent of the Munich buildings lay in ruins, and teaching restarted in April 1946.
Post-war growth moved north. A research reactor built at Garching in 1956 seeded what is now the largest campus, about 10 km from the city, home to physics, chemistry, informatics and engineering alongside Max Planck institutes, the European Southern Observatory's headquarters and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. A medical school followed in 1967 at the Rechts der Isar Hospital, and sports science later settled in the 1972 Olympic Park.
TUM Asia in Singapore made it the first German university to set up a subsidiary abroad. Other outposts sit in Freising, Heilbronn, Straubing and Ottobrunn, and by 2023 its departments had been merged into seven schools. More playfully, its team won the A2RL autonomous car racing league in Abu Dhabi in both 2024 and 2025.
Source: Technical University of Munich
