page_title: Bern
section_title: Notable people
hierarchical_section_title: Bern / Notable people
caption_attribution_description: English: Jennifer Oehrli (April 2013), Basel St. Jakob-ParkDeutsch: Jennifer Oehrli (April 2013), Basel St. Jakob-Park
context_page_description: Bern is the de facto capital of Switzerland, referred to by the Swiss as their "federal city", in German Bundesstadt, French ville fédérale, and Italian città federale. With a population of about 144,000, Bern is the fifth-most populous city in Switzerland. The Bern agglomeration, which includes 36 municipalities, had a population of 406,900 in 2014. The metropolitan area had a population of 660,000 in 2000. Bern is also the capital of the canton of Bern, the second-most populous of Switzerland's cantons.
  The official language in Bern is German, but the most-spoken language is an Alemannic Swiss German dialect, Bernese German.
  In 1983, the historic old town in the centre of Bern became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
context_section_description: Public servants, the military and the church
  Conrad Justinger (c. 1360–1438) – chronicler, magistrate and notary public of the city of Bern
  Johann Jakob Grynaeus (1540–1617) – Protestant divine, a theologian of the school of Huldrych Zwingli
  Robert Scipio, Freiherr von Lentulus (1714–1786) – military officer, in Austrian and later, Prussian service
  Emmanuel Han (1801–1867) – Swiss military officer and philhellene who fought in the Greek War of Independence
  Walter Breisky (1871–1944) – Austrian jurist, civil servant and politician
  Rosalie Dreyer (1895–1987) – Swiss-born naturalized British nurse, a pioneer in Britain's public-funded nursing service
  August R. Lindt (1905–2000) – lawyer and diplomat, Chairman of UNICEF 1953–1954 and UN High Commissioner for Refugees 1956–1960
  Marc Hodler (1918–2006) – lawyer, President of the International Ski Federation 1951–1998, exposed the 2002 Winter Olympic bid scandal
  Hans Urwyler (1925–1994) – Christian minister of the New Apostolic Church
  Kofi Annan (1938–2018 in Bern) – UN Secretary-General 1997–2006
  Algirdas Paleckis (born 1971) – Lithuanian diplomat, politician and columnist
  Politicians and the landed gentry
  Adrian von Bubenberg (c. 1434–1479) – Bernese knight, military commander and 3-time mayor (Schultheiss) of Bern, hero of the Battle of Murten
  Niklaus Dachselhofer (1595–1670) – Bernese politician, Schultheiss (mayor) of Bern 1636–1667
  Christoph von Graffenried, 1st Baron of Bernberg (1661–1743) – British peer from Switzerland who founded New Bern, North Carolina in 1710
  Susanna Julie von Bondeli (1731–1778) – famous salonist and lady of letters, the salon became the center of intellectual life in Bern.
  Grand Duchess Anna Feodorovna of Russia (1781 – Elfenau, near Bern 1860) – German princess of the ducal house of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld
  Mikhail Bakunin (1814– 1876 in Bern) – Russian revolutionary anarchist
  Karl Schenk (1823–1895) – pastor, politician and longest serving member of the Swiss Federal Council 1863–1895
  Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) – lived in Bern 1914–1917
  Louise Elisabeth de Meuron (1882–1980) – aristocrat and eccentric personality in Bern
  Dom Duarte Pio, Duke of Braganza (born 1945) – claimant to the defunct Portuguese throne, as the head of the House of Braganza
  Regula Rytz (born 1962) – politician, sociologist and historian 
  Ursula Wyss (born 1973) – economist and politician
  Min Li Marti (born 1974), politician, publisher, sociologist and historian
  Science and academia
  Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) – anatomist, physiologist, naturalist, encyclopedist, bibliographer and poet 
  Carl Adolf Otth (1803–1839) – naturalist
  Gustav Heinrich Otth (1806–1874) – mycologist
  Carl Brunner von Wattenwyl (1823–1914) – entomologist who specialised in Orthoptera
  Ludwig Fischer (1828–1907) – botanist, researched phanerogams and cryptogams
  Emil Theodor Kocher (1841–1917) – physician and medical researcher, received the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on the thyroid 
  Arnold Klebs (1870–1943) – physician who specialized in the study of tuberculosis
  Anna Tumarkin (1875–1951) – Russian-born, naturalized Swiss academic, the first woman to become a professor of philosophy at the University of Bern
  Albert Einstein (1879–1955) – worked out his theory of relativity while living in Bern, employed as a patent examiner at the patent office
  Ida Hoff (1880–1952) – pioneering doctor, a feminist activist and one of Bern's first regular female motorists
  Aimé Félix Tschiffely (1895–1954) – Swiss-born, Argentine professor, writer and equestrian adventurer
  Hans Albert Einstein (1904–1973) – Swiss-American engineer and educator, the second child and first son of Albert Einstein
  Friedrich Tinner (born 1937) – nuclear engineer connected with the proliferation of nuclear materials in Iran, Libya, and North Korea
  Claudia Rosiny (born 1960) – German-Swiss academic in Dance and Media studies, a festival director and cultural manager
  Daniel Mojon (born 1963) – ophthalmologist and ophthalmic surgeon, invented minimally-invasive strabismus surgery
  Writing and acting
  Ulrich Boner or Bonerius (
caption: Jenni Oehrli, 2013
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