Eötvös Loránd University
public research university in Budapest, Hungary
Eötvös Loránd University (Hungarian: Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, ELTE, also known as University of Budapest) is a public research university based in Budapest, Hungary. Founded in 1635, it is the longest continuously operating university in the country.
The almost 30 thousand students at ELTE are organized into nine faculties, and into research institutes located throughout Budapest and on the scenic banks of the Danube. ELTE is affiliated with 7 Nobel laureates, as well as winners of the Wolf Prize, Fulkerson Prize and Abel Prize, the latest of which was Nobel Prize in Literature winner László Krasznahorkai in 2025.
The predecessor of Eötvös Loránd University was founded in 1635 by Cardinal Péter Pázmány in Nagyszombat, Kingdom of Hungary (today Trnava, Slovakia) as a Catholic university for teaching theology and philosophy. In 1770, the university was transferred to Buda, later to Pest. It was named Royal University of Pest until 1873, then University of Budapest until 1921, when it was renamed Royal Hungarian Pázmány Péter University after its founder Péter Pázmány. The Faculty of Science started its autonomous life in 1949, when the Faculty of Theology and the Faculty of Medicine was separated from the university (now Pázmány Péter Catholic University and Semmelweis University). The university received its current name in 1950, after one of its most well-known physicists, Baron Loránd Eötvös.
History
The university was founded in 1635 in Nagyszombat, Kingdom of Hungary (today Trnava, Slovakia) by the archbishop and theologian Péter Pázmány.
The public source identifies “Eötvös Loránd University” as public research university in Budapest, Hungary. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Eötvös, Loránd and University.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q390287. VIAF identifies the subject as 147301654. The Library of Congress control number is n79065615. Authority coordinates are 47.491, 19.058. 1 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1635, 2025, 1770 and 1873.
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This entry incorporates text from “Eötvös Loránd University” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.