University of Paderborn

Paderborn University

Universität Paderborn
Motto	Die Universität der Informationsgesellschaft
Motto in English	The University of the Information Society
Type	Public
Established	1614 to 1819 and Re-founded 1972
Endowment	€157.3 million (annually)
President	Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Wilhelm Schäfer
Administrative staff	2,024
Students	18,500
Location	Paderborn, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Campus	urban
Colours	Blue and White
Affiliations	EUA (European University Association) DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) ASIIN (Akkreditierungsagentur für Studiengänge der Ingenieurwissenschaften, der Informatik, der Naturwissenschaften und der Mathematik e.V.)
Website	www.upb.de

The Paderborn University (German: Universität Paderborn) is one of the fourteen universities of higher learning in North Rhine-Westphalia state of Germany. It was founded in 1972 and over 17,421 students were enrolled at the university as of December 2011. It offers 105 different degree programmes. The Paderborn University ranks high in the areas of Computer Science, Business Management and English. The number of students enrolled at the university has steadily increased in recent years, and as a result, the university is continuously expanding and updating the infrastructure.

Particularly notable is the newly established Master of Arts program in Comparative Literature in the faculty of Cultural Studies. The university houses the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing that supports research activities in wide areas of Computational science and Engineering.

The university has several winners of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize awarded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and ERC grant recipients of the European Research Council. Furthermore, in 2002, the romanian mathematician Preda Mihăilescu proved the Catalan conjecture, a number-theoretical conjecture, formulated by the French and Belgian mathematician Eugène Charles Catalan, which had stood unresolved for 158 years.

In 2006, the computer science program was ranked among the top 3 programs in the most comprehensive and detailed ranking of German universities by the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHE) and the German weekly news magazine "Die Zeit". In the same year, the university was ranked among the leading institutions in terms of gaining research funds in the areas of electrical engineering, computer science and systems engineering by the German Research Foundation.

The interdiciplinary research centers at the university include Heinz Nixdorf Institute, Paderborn center for Parallel Computing, Paderborn Institute for Scientific Computation, Cooperative Computing and Communication Laboratory (C-Lab) and Software quality lab (S-lab).RailCab is a research project by the University of Paderborn. Its purpose is the examination of the use of linear engines for the propulsion of autonomous, rail mounted vehicles.