Short answers, pulled from the story.
The University of Vienna was founded on the 12th of March 1365 by Rudolf IV, Duke of Austria. It is the oldest university in the contemporary German-speaking world and the third oldest in Central Europe, after the Charles University in Prague (1347) and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (1364).
The University of Vienna is affiliated with 17 Nobel Prize laureates. They span the fields of Physiology or Medicine, Chemistry, Physics, Economics, and Literature, with recipients ranging from Robert Bárány in 1914 to Anton Zeilinger in Physics in 2022.
Notable scholars who studied or taught at the University of Vienna include Sigmund Freud, Karl Popper, Stefan Zweig, Gregor Mendel, Gustav Mahler, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Erwin Schrödinger. The university was also the founding home of the Austrian School of economics, which included Carl Menger, Joseph Schumpeter, and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk.
Women were admitted as full students to the University of Vienna in 1897, though initially only in the Philosophy faculty. Medicine followed in 1900, Law in 1919, Protestant Theology in 1923, and Roman Catholic Theology last, in 1946. Elise Richter became the first woman to receive habilitation at the university in 1907, as professor of Romance languages.
By 2026, the University Library of the University of Vienna holds approximately 7.8 million volumes across the Main Library and 33 specialist libraries, making it the largest library in Austria. The oldest item in the collection is a Bible from the Dorothean monastery dated 1392.
In the Times Higher Education rankings for 2026, the University of Vienna placed 95th globally, becoming the first Austrian university to break into the top 100. It ranked 152nd in the QS World University Ranking 2026 and in the 101-150 group in the Shanghai Ranking for 2025, remaining the highest-ranked Austrian university in all three systems.