[2] The university played a crucial role in Edinburgh becoming a leading intellectual centre during the Scottish Enlightenment and contributed to the city being nicknamed the "Athens of the North".

In 1557, Bishop Robert Reid of St Magnus Cathedral on Orkney made a will containing an endowment of 8,000 merks to build a college in Edinburgh.

The King brokered a monetary compromise and granted a royal charter on 14 April 1582, empowering the town council to create a college of higher education.

[20][21][22] A college established by secular authorities was unprecedented in newly Presbyterian Scotland, as all previous Scottish universities had been founded through papal bulls.

[24][25] Instruction began under the charge of a graduate from the University of St Andrews, theologian Robert Rollock, who first served as Regent, and from 1586 as principal of the college.

[24][29] After the deposition of King James II and VII during the Glorious Revolution in 1688, the Parliament of Scotland passed legislation designed to root out Jacobite sympathisers amongst university staff.

The late 17th and early 18th centuries were marked by a power struggle between the university and town council, which had ultimate authority over staff appointments, curricula, and examinations.

[36] The ideas of the Age of Enlightenment fell on especially fertile ground in Edinburgh because of the university's democratic and secular origin; its organization as a single entity instead of loosely connected colleges, which encouraged academic exchange; its adoption of the more flexible Dutch model of professorship, rather than having student cohorts taught by a single regent; and the lack of land endowments as its source of income, which meant its faculty operated in a more competitive environment.

The site was used to construct Old College, the university's first custom-built building, by architect William Henry Playfair to plans by Robert Adam.

[32] The act established governing bodies including a university court and a general council, and redefined the roles of key officials like the chancellor, rector, and principal.

Although the university blocked them from graduating and qualifying as doctors, their campaign gained national attention and won them many supporters, including Charles Darwin.

[89] In December 2002, the Edinburgh Cowgate fire destroyed a number of university buildings, including some 3,000 m2 (32,000 sq ft) of the School of Informatics at 80 South Bridge.

[93] In April 2008, the Roslin Institute – an animal sciences research centre known for cloning Dolly the sheep – became part of the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies.

[94] In 2011, the school moved into a new £60 million building on the Easter Bush campus, which now houses research and teaching facilities, and a hospital for small and farm animals.

[107] The university's largest expansion in the 2020s was the conversion of some of the historic Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh buildings in Lauriston Place, which had been vacated in 2003 and partially developed into the Quartermile.

The £120 million project created a home for the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI), an interdisciplinary hub linking arts, humanities, and social sciences with other disciplines in the research and teaching of complex, multi-stakeholder societal challenges.

[136] The Institute won international fame in 1996, when its researchers Sir Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and their colleagues created Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell.

The Senatus Academicus is the university's supreme academic body, chaired by the principal and consisting of the professors, heads of departments, and a number of readers, lecturers and other teaching and research staff.

[209] The university offers students the opportunity to study in Europe and beyond via the European Union's Erasmus+ programme[d] and a variety of international exchange agreements with around 300 partners institutions in nearly 40 countries worldwide.

[221] 90 per cent of the university's research activity was judged to be 'world leading' (4*) or 'internationally excellent' (3*), and five departments – Computer Science, Informatics, Sociology, Anthropology, and Development Studies – were ranked as the best in the UK.

[223] A 2015 government report found that Edinburgh was one of only two Scottish universities (along with St Andrews) that some London-based elite recruitment firms considered applicants from, especially in the field of financial services and investment banking.

[224] When The New York Times ranked universities based on the employability of graduates as evaluated by recruiters from top companies in 20 countries in 2012, Edinburgh was placed at 42nd in the world and 7th in Britain.

[229] The disparity between Edinburgh's research capacity, endowment and international status on the one hand, and its ranking in national league tables on the other, is largely due to the impact of measures of 'student satisfaction'.

[232] Edinburgh improved only marginally over the next years, with the 2021 Good University Guide still ranking it in the bottom 10 domestically in both teaching quality and student experience.

[258] Student sport at Edinburgh consists of clubs covering the more traditional rugby, football, rowing and judo, to the more unconventional korfball, gliding and mountaineering.

[268][269][270] The activist group People & Planet took over Charles Stewart House in 2015 and again in 2016 in protest over the university's investment in companies active in arms manufacturing or fossil fuel extraction.

[273] In May 2024, student activists set up a protest camp in the Old College Quad, with some also beginning a hunger strike,[274] and demanded divestment from companies they alleged supported the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip.

[284] The university is associated with some of the most significant intellectual and scientific contributions in human history, which include: the foundation of Antiseptic surgery (Joseph Lister),[285] Bayesian statistics (Thomas Bayes),[286] Economics (Adam Smith),[287] Electromagnetism (James Clerk Maxwell),[288] Evolution (Charles Darwin),[289][290] Knot theory (Peter Guthrie Tait),[291] modern Geology (James Hutton),[292] Nephrology (Richard Bright),[293] Endocrinology (Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer),[294] Hematology (William Hewson),[295] Dermatology (Robert Willan),[296] Epigenetics (C. H. Waddington),[297] Gestalt psychology (Kurt Koffka), Thermodynamics (William Rankine), Colloid chemistry (Thomas Graham),[298] and Wave theory (Thomas Young); the discovery of Brownian motion (Robert Brown),[299] Magnesium, carbon dioxide, latent heat and specific heat (Joseph Black),[300][301] chloroform anaesthesia (Sir James Young Simpson),[302] Hepatitis B vaccine (Sir Kenneth Murray),[303] Cygnus X-1 black hole (Paul Murdin),[304] Higgs mechanism (Sir Tom Kibble),[305][306] structure of DNA (Sir John Randall),[307] HPV vaccine (Ian Frazer), Iridium and Osmium (Smithson Tennant),[308] Nitrogen (Daniel Rutherford),[309] Strontium (Thomas Charles Hope),[310] and SARS coronavirus (Zhong Nanshan);[311] and the invention of the Stirling engine (Robert Stirling),[312] Cavity magnetron (Sir John Randall),[313] ATM (John Shepherd-Barron),[314] refrigerator (William Cullen),[315] diving chamber (John Scott Haldane),[316] reflecting telescope (James Gregory),[317] hypodermic syringe (Alexander Wood),[318][319] kaleidoscope (Sir David Brewster),[320] pneumatic tyre (John Boyd Dunlop),[321] telephone (Alexander Graham Bell),[322] telpherage (Fleeming Jenkin), and vacuum flask (Sir James Dewar).

[363] As of October 2024[update], 20 Nobel Prize laureates, with 20 awards, have been affiliated with the university as alumni, faculty members or researchers (three additional laureates acted as administrative staff),[366] including one of the fathers of quantum mechanics Max Born,[367] theoretical physicist Peter Higgs,[368] Cognitive scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton (also a Turing Award winner),[369][370] chemist Sir Fraser Stoddart,[371] immunologist Peter C. Doherty,[372] economist Sir James Mirrlees,[373] discoverer of Characteristic X-ray (Charles Glover Barkla)[374] and the mechanism of ATP synthesis (Peter D. Mitchell),[375] and pioneer in cryo-electron microscopy (Richard Henderson)[376] and in-vitro fertilisation (Sir Robert Edwards).

[377] Turing Award winners Robin Milner[378] Leslie Valiant,[379] and mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah,[380] Fields Medalist and Abel Prize laureate, are associated with the university.