University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private university located principally in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. Founded in 1890 by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, the University of Chicago held its first classes on October 1, 1892. Chicago was one of the first universities in the country to be conceived as a combination of the American interdisciplinary liberal arts college and the German research university.

Affiliated with 79 Nobel Prize laureates, the University of Chicago is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost universities. Historically, the university is noted for its unique undergraduate core curriculum as well as other educational innovations pioneered by Robert Maynard Hutchins in the 1930s (including the academic quarter system), and for influential academic movements such as the Chicago School of Economics, the Chicago School of Sociology, the Chicago School of Literary Criticism, and the law and economics movement in legal analysis. The University of Chicago was the site of the world's first man-made self-sustaining nuclear reaction. It is also home to the largest university press in the United States.