RWTH Aachen University, the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, is in Aachen in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Its history page records that teaching began in October 1870, with 201 students, listeners and guests in the first academic year. The legal notice describes it as a public institution represented by the Rector, Ulrich Rüdiger, under the oversight of the state’s Ministry of Culture and Science.
The university is organised in ten faculties, from Mathematics and Natural Sciences to Medicine, and reports 260 institutes. In the 2025/26 winter semester it had 44,382 students, including 15,811 international students from 141 countries. For 2025 it reports 570 professors in full-time equivalents and an annual budget of 1,264 million euros, of which 523 million euros came from external funding.