[3] It is named after its most famous faculty member, Justus von Liebig, the founder of modern agricultural chemistry and inventor of artificial fertiliser.

Endowed with a charter issued by Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, on 19 May 1607, the university was allowed to proceed with instruction in October 1607.

In the 17th and 18th centuries the Ludoviciana was a typical small state university that then had the four common faculties (theology, law, medicine, and philosophy).

In the 18th century came gradual modernization of the curricula and reforms in the instruction, which were definitively influenced by the local lordly court in Darmstadt.

In the Faculty of Economics, new practical subjects were brought together (veterinary medicine, forestry, and cameral sciences), which the university was supposed to make "expedient" and "profitable".

Young, promising scientists created a new impulse in their respective areas of knowledge; among these scientists were the antiquarian Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, the lawyer Rudolf von Jhering, the theologian Adolf von Harnack, the mathematician Moritz Pasch and the physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen.

With the creation of the university's central building (inaugurated 1880) and the adjacent newly constructed facilities for chemistry and physics a new cultural centre was established on what was then the border of the city.

The decisive backer of this project was the last Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig, to whom the university bestowed out of thankfulness the honorary title of "Rector Magnificentissimus".

[11] Next to Liebig, famous professors at the university included the physician Georg Haas (who carried out the world's first human hemodialysis in Giessen in 1924), the theologian Adolf von Harnack, the lawyer Rudolf von Jhering, the economist and statistician Etienne Laspeyres, the physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, the mathematicians Moritz Pasch and Alfred Clebsch, the gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, the philologist and archaeologist Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, the orientalists Friedrich Schwally, Paul E. Kahle and Eberhard Schrader, and the president of Hebrew University of Jerusalem Benjamin Mazar.

Notable alumni of the university include organic chemist August Kekulé, X-ray physicist Simone Techert, health sociologist Thomas Abel, romantic dramatist and revolutionary Georg Büchner, literary and political historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus and botanist Johann Jacob Dillenius.

Also Hans-Joachim Preuss, former Secretary General of Welthungerhilfe and managing director of the giz (gtz) graduated and worked at the University of Giessen.