Short answers, pulled from the story.
The University of Toronto was founded on the 15th of March 1827, when King George IV issued a royal charter establishing it as King's College. It assumed its present name in 1850 when it became a secular institution after severing ties with the Church of England.
The University of Toronto is the birthplace of insulin (discovered by Banting and Best in 1921), stem cell research (1963), and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. Researchers also performed the world's first successful single-lung transplant (1981), nerve transplant (1988), and double-lung transplant (1989), and produced the first observational evidence of black holes through studies on Cygnus X-1 in 1972.
Total enrolment across the university's three campuses surpassed 100,000 students for the first time in 2024, making it the largest post-secondary institution in Canada. In 2024-25, 28.8 per cent of students were international.
The University of Toronto operates three campuses: the historic St. George campus in downtown Toronto on 55.8 hectares, the Scarborough campus on 300 acres in eastern Toronto (opened in 1964), and the Mississauga campus on 225 acres of forested land along the Credit River (established in 1967). The suburban campuses together make up nearly half the university's undergraduate student body.
The Toronto School is an influential movement in communication theory and literary criticism described as the theory of the primacy of communication in the structuring of human cultures and the human mind. It is rooted in the works of Eric A. Havelock and Harold Innis, with subsequent contributions from Edmund Snow Carpenter, Northrop Frye, and Marshall McLuhan. Since 1963, the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology has carried the mandate for advancing the school's ideas.
University of Toronto alumni include five Canadian prime ministers (among them William Lyon Mackenzie King and Lester B. Pearson), 17 justices of the Supreme Court of Canada, 13 Nobel laureates, and 6 Turing Award winners. Writers Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, directors David Cronenberg and Norman Jewison, computer scientists Alfred Aho and Brian Kernighan, and journalist Malcolm Gladwell are among its graduates.