page_title: Basel
section_title: Universities
hierarchical_section_title: Basel / Education / Universities
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Gründungszeremonie der Universität Basel am 4. April 1460 im Basler Münster. Bischof Johann V. von Venningen (mittig mit seinem Wappen) gründet die Universität Basel. Universitätsbibliothek Basel AN II 3, Rektoratsmatrikel der Universität Basel, Band 1 (1460-1567), Titelminiatur der Rektoratsmatrikel [1] Martin Steinmann, Universitätsbibliothek Basel, bearbeitet und ergänzt von Ueli Dill und Florian Mittenhuber, Universitätsbibliothek Basel, 2010.
context_page_description: Basel or Basle is a city in northwestern Switzerland on the river Rhine. Basel is Switzerland's third-most-populous city with about 180,000 inhabitants. The official language of Basel is German, but the main spoken language is the local Basel German dialect.
  Basel is commonly considered to be the cultural capital of Switzerland. The city is famous for its many museums, ranging from the Kunstmuseum, the first collection of art accessible to the public in the world and the largest museum of art in Switzerland, to the Fondation Beyeler and the Museum of Contemporary Art, the first public museum of contemporary art in Europe. The University of Basel, Switzerland's oldest university, and the city's centuries-long commitment to humanism, have made Basel a safe haven at times of political unrest in other parts of Europe for such notable people as Erasmus of Rotterdam, the Holbein family, Friedrich Nietzsche, and in the 20th century also Hermann Hesse and Karl Jaspers.
  The city of Basel is Switzerland's second-largest economic centre after the city of Zürich and has the highest GDP per capita in the country, ahead of the cantons of Zug and Geneva.
context_section_description: Basel hosts Switzerland's oldest university, the University of Basel, dating from 1460. Erasmus, Paracelsus, Daniel Bernoulli, Leonhard Euler, Jacob Burckhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Tadeusz Reichstein, Karl Jaspers, Carl Gustav Jung and Karl Barth worked there. The University of Basel is currently counted among the 90 best educational institutions worldwide.
  In 2007, the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich) established the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) in Basel. The creation of the D-BSSE was driven by a Swiss-wide research initiative SystemsX, and was jointly supported by funding from the ETH Zürich, the Swiss Government, the Swiss University Conference (SUC) and private industry.
  Basel also hosts several academies of the Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz|Fachhochschule NW (FHNW): the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, FHNW Academy of Music, and the FHNW School of Business.
  Basel is renowned for various scientific societies, such as the Entomological Society of Basel (Entomologische Gesellschaft Basel, EGB), which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2005.
caption: Inauguration ceremony of the University of Basel, 1460
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