Humanism was represented at Heidelberg University particularly by the founder of the older German Humanistic School Rudolph Agricola, Conrad Celtes, Jakob Wimpfeling, and Johann Reuchlin.

[29] Martin Luther's disputation at Heidelberg in April 1518 made a lasting impact, and his adherents among the masters and scholars soon became leading Reformationists in Southwest Germany.

As the 16th century was passing, the late humanism stepped beside Calvinism as a predominant school of thought; and figures like Paul Schede, Jan Gruter, Martin Opitz, and Matthäus Merian taught at the university.

As a consequence of the disturbances caused by the French Revolution, and particularly because of the Treaty of Lunéville, the university lost all its property on the left bank of the Rhine, so that its complete dissolution was expected.

[33] This decline did not stop until 1803, when the university was reestablished as a state-owned institution by Karl Friedrich, Grand Duke of Baden, to whom the part of the Palatinate situated on the right bank of the Rhine was allotted.

During the late 19th century, the university housed a very liberal and open-minded spirit, which was deliberately fostered by Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch and a circle of colleagues around them.

In the Weimar Republic, the university was widely recognized as a center of democratic thinking, coined by professors like Karl Jaspers, Gustav Radbruch, Martin Dibelius and Alfred Weber.

Following the assassination of the liberal German-Jewish Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, he refused to half mast the national flag on the institute, thereby provoking its storming by communist students.

It is situated in the Rhine Neckar Triangle, a European metropolitan area with approximately 2.4 million people living there, comprising the neighboring cities of Heidelberg, Mannheim, Ludwigshafen, and a number of smaller towns in the perimeter.

Its erection was largely financed by donations of wealthy American families, in line with a fundraising campaign of Jacob Gould Schurman, an alumnus of Heidelberg University and former United States Ambassador to Germany.

Education in humanities and social sciences takes place to a great extent in buildings spread over the ancient part of town, though most are less than ten minutes walk from University Square.

In the 16th century, Otto Henry, Elector Palatine, combined the miscellaneous book collections accrued since the foundation of the university with the princely library housed in Heidelberg Castle to form the Bibliotheca Palatina and made them publicly accessible in the galleries of the Heiliggeistkirche.

The majority of the library holdings, which enjoyed great contemporary renown, was looted during the Thirty Years' War, transported to Rome and was gifted to Pope Gregory XV by the victorious Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria in 1622.

Based on the designs of architect Joseph Durum, a dedicated library building, a richly ornamented, four-winged red sandstone construction, was erected from 1901 to 1905.

[51] Heidelberg University's South Asia Institute maintains branch offices in New Delhi (India)), Islamabad (Pakistan), Kathmandu (Nepal), and Colombo (Sri Lanka).

Its main tasks include promoting existing collaborations, building up new networks, creating joint study programs, and maintaining and expanding academic contacts with American universities.

The University Council is the advisory board to the aforementioned entities and encompasses, among others, the former Israeli Ambassador to Germany Avi Primor, as well as CEOs of German industries.

The selection is exercised by allocating the best qualified applicants to a given number of places available in the respective discipline, thus depending primarily on the chosen subjects and the grade point average of the Abitur or its equivalent.

For some majors and minors in humanities—particularly for conceptually non-vocational like classics and ancient history—unrestricted admission is granted under certain criteria (e.g., relevant language proficiency), as applications regularly do not exceed the number of places available.

Admission to consecutive Master's programs always requires at least an undergraduate degree equivalent to the German grade "good" (i.e., normally B+ in American, or 2:1 in British terms).

[89] Moreover, Heidelberg researchers invented the process of plastination to preserve body tissue,[90] conducted the first successful transplantation of hematopoietic stem cells,[91] and recently developed a new strategy for a vaccination against certain forms of cancer, which earned Harald zur Hausen of the university the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2008.

In total, the Higher Education Compass of the German Rector's Conference lists staff and student exchange agreements as well as research cooperations with 236 universities worldwide.

The jury of journalists from major newspapers commended its "well balanced, though critical attitude" and its "simply great" layout that "suffices highest professional demands."

[citation needed] Alumni and faculty of the university include many founders and pioneers of academic disciplines, and a large number of internationally acclaimed philosophers, poets, jurisprudents, theologians, natural and social scientists.

Former university affiliates in the field of religion include Pope Pius II, cardinals, bishops, and with Philipp Melanchthon and Zacharias Ursinus, two key leaders of the Protestant Reformation.

Alumni in the field of arts include classical composer Robert Schumann, philosophers Ludwig Feuerbach and Edmund Montgomery, poet Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff and writers Christian Friedrich Hebbel, Gottfried Keller, Irene Frisch, Heinrich Hoffmann, Sir Muhammad Iqbal, National Hero of the Philippines José Rizal, W. Somerset Maugham, Jean Paul, Literature Nobel laureate Carl Spitteler, and novelist Jagoda Marinić.

Philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Jaspers, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jürgen Habermas served as university professors, as did also the pioneering scientists Hermann von Helmholtz, Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, Emil Kraepelin, the founder of scientific psychiatry, and outstanding social scientists such as Max Weber, the founding father of modern sociology.

[110] In William Somerset Maugham's 1915 masterpiece novel Of Human Bondage, he described the one-year stay of the protagonist Philip Carey at Heidelberg University, in a largely autobiographical way.

Nearly a decade after his affair with an older woman came to a mysterious end, Michael Berg, a law student at the university, re-encounters his former lover as she defends herself in a war-crimes trial, which he observes as part of a seminar.

[114] MGM's 1954 color remake The Student Prince, featuring the voice of Mario Lanza, is based on Sigmund Romberg's operetta version of the story.