100 Notable alumni of Technical University of Munich

Costin D. Nenițescu (in some places Nenitzescu ( Romanian pronunciation: [kosˈtin neniˈt͡sesku]; 15 July 1902 – 28 July 1970) was a prominent Romanian chemist, and a professor at the Politehnica University of Bucharest. He was a titular member of the Romanian Academy, a corresponding member of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and a member of the Leopoldina Academy...

Holm Gero Hümmler is a German nuclear physicist and skeptic, living in Bad Homburg, near Frankfurt am Main.

Harald Fritzsch was a German theoretical physicist known for his contributions to the theory of quarks, the development of quantum chromodynamics and the grand unification of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Philipp Graf von und zu Lerchenfeld was a German politician for the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU). He worked in both regional and national politics, most notably being member of the Landtag of Bavaria from 2003 to 2013 and then serving as a member of the Bundestag from 2013 to 2017.

Cengiz Bektaş was a Turkish architect, engineer, poet and writer for Evrensel newspaper.

Heinrich Georg Barkhausen was a German physicist who established an influential research laboratory in Dresden. The phenomenon by which ferromagnetic domains align during magnetization and produce discrete acoustic changes due to rotations of the Weiss domains is named after his observations as the magnetic Barkhausen effect. He is also remembered in the Barkhausen criteria for electrical oscillators.

Josef Ertl was a German politician who served as the minister of agriculture in different cabinets of West Germany and was a member of the Free Democratic Party (FDP).

Markus Ferber is a German engineer and politician who has been serving as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) since 1994. He is a member of the Christian Social Union, part of the European People's Party. In addition to his parliamentary work, Ferber has been serving as president of the Hanns Seidel Foundation (HSS) since 2020.

Richard Kauffmann was a German-Jewish architect who migrated to Palestine in 1920. His architecture was influenced by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a proponent of the International Style, and was applied to the local landscape, laying the architectural groundwork for the nascent State of Israel as well as that of several cities including Hadar HaCarmel in Haifa, Nahalal, Afula and...

Bruno Ahrends, born as Bruno Arons, was an internationally known German architect, who worked in Berlin, Germany. He was a representative of Berlin Modernism Housing Estates before World War I and during Weimar Republic (1910s to 1930s). Most of his creations today are under Cultural heritage management, some are part of a World Heritage Site.

David Gries is an American computer scientist at Cornell University, mainly known for his books The Science of Programming (1981) and A Logical Approach to Discrete Math (1993, with Fred B. Schneider).

Rudolf Wilhelm "Willy" Nebel was a German officer, WWI pilot of the Fliegertruppe and spaceflight advocate active in Germany's amateur rocket group, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR – "Spaceflight Society") in the 1930s as well as in rebuilding German rocketry following World War II.

Kurt Maetzig was a German film director who had a significant effect on the film industry in East Germany. He was one of the most respected filmmakers of the GDR. After his retirement he lived in Wildkuhl, Mecklenburg, and had three children.

Walter Hohmann was a German engineer who made an important contribution to the understanding of orbital dynamics. In a book published in 1925, Hohmann demonstrated a fuel-efficient path to move a spacecraft between two different orbits, now called a Hohmann transfer orbit. He received his Ph.D. from the RWTH Aachen University in 1920.

Julius Meier-Graefe was a German art critic and novelist.

Simone Blum is a German show jumper. In 2018, she won the individual gold medal at the 2018 World Equestrian Games on her horse DSP Alice.

Joachim Milberg is a German engineer and manager who was CEO of Bayerischen Motorenwerke AG (BMW). He was chairman of the Supervisory Board of BMW until July 2015.

Marcus Hutter is a German computer scientist, professor and artificial intelligence researcher. As a senior researcher at DeepMind, he studies the mathematical foundations of artificial general intelligence.

Rudolf Hell was a German inventor and engineer.

Kazimierz Fabrycy was a Polish general.

Franz Joseph Emil Fischer was a German chemist. He was the founder and first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research. He is known for the discovery of the Fischer–Tropsch process.

Ludwig Hohlwein was a German poster artist, a pioneer of the Sachplakat style. He trained and practiced as an architect in Munich before he switched to poster design.

Martin Wilhelm Kutta was a German mathematician. In 1901, he co-developed the Runge–Kutta method, used to solve ordinary differential equations numerically. He is also remembered for the Zhukovsky–Kutta aerofoil, the Kutta–Zhukovsky theorem and the Kutta condition in aerodynamics.

Fritz Walther Meissner was a German physicist known for his work on superconductivity.

Theodor Fischer was a German architect and teacher.

Johann Deisenhofer is a German biochemist who, along with Hartmut Michel and Robert Huber, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1988 for their determination of the first crystal structure of an integral membrane protein, a membrane-bound complex of proteins and co-factors that is essential to photosynthesis.

Edward Alexander Wadsworth ARA was an English artist initially associated with the Vorticism movement. In the First World War he was part of a team involved in the transfer of dazzle camouflage designs to ships for the Royal Navy. After the war his maritime landscapes and still-life compositions using tempera were infused with a surrealistic mood - although he never...

Bernhard Kellermann was a German author and poet.

Norbert Singer is a German automotive engineer. He has played a key role in every one of Porsche’s 16 overall race victories between 1970 and 1998 at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud was a Dutch architect. His fame began as a follower of the De Stijl movement.

Wilhelm Kreis was a prominent German architect and professor of architecture, active through four political systems in German history: the Wilhelmine era, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the foundation of the Federal Republic.

Otto Bemberg was a German Argentine businessman prominent in the development of early Argentine industry. He is mostly notable for having been the founder of Cervecería y Maltería Quilmes, the largest brewery in the country.

Natalie Grams is a German physician and author. Formerly a practicing homeopath, she became known throughout Germany as a whistleblower for her 2015 debut book Homeopathy Reconsidered – What Really Helps Patients in which she criticized homeopathy. From 2016 to 2023 she had been a member of the Science Council of the Society for the Scientific Investigation of Parasciences (GWUP...

Julian Rosefeldt is a German artist and film-maker. Rosefeldt's work consists primarily of elaborate, visually opulent film and video installations, often shown as panoramic multi-channel projections. His installations range in style from documentary to theatrical narrative.

Manfred Schnelldorfer is a German former figure skater. He is the 1964 Olympic champion, the 1964 World champion, and an eight-time German national champion.

Wolf Graf von Baudissin was a German general, military planner and peace researcher. He was one of the developers of the concepts of Innere Führung (officially translated as "leadership development and civic education") and Staatsbürger in Uniform ("citizens in uniform"), the two lead concepts of the modern German Bundeswehr.

Konrad Emil Bloch ForMemRS was a German-American biochemist. Bloch received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1964 (joint with Feodor Lynen) for discoveries concerning the mechanism and regulation of the cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism.

Erwin Neher is a German biophysicist, specializing in the field of cell physiology. For significant contribution in the field, in 1991 he was awarded, along with Bert Sakmann, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "their discoveries concerning the function of single ion channels in cells".

Harrington Emerson was an American efficiency engineer and business theorist, who founded the management consultancy firm Emerson Institute in New York City in 1900. Known for his pioneering contributions to scientific management, Emerson may have done more than anyone else to popularize the topic: His public testimony in 1910 to the Interstate Commerce Commission that the railroads could save $1,000,000...

Ernst Otto Fischer was a German chemist who won the Nobel Prize for pioneering work in the area of organometallic chemistry.

Oskar Franz Xaver Miller, since 1875 von Miller, was a German engineer and founder of the Deutsches Museum, a large museum of technology and science in Munich.

Paul Bonatz was a German architect, member of the Stuttgart School and professor at the technical university in that city during part of World War II, and from 1954 until his death. He worked in many styles, but most often in a simplified neo-Romanesque, and designed important public buildings both in the Weimar Republic and under the Third Reich, including...

Robert Huber is a German biochemist and Nobel laureate. known for his work crystallizing an intramembrane protein important in photosynthesis and subsequently applying X-ray crystallography to elucidate the protein's structure.

Evgeny "Eugen" Evgenievich Slutsky was a Russian and Soviet mathematical statistician, economist and political economist. He is primarily known for the Slutsky equation and the Slutsky–Yule effect.

Heinrich Tessenow was a German architect, professor, and urban planner active at the time of the Weimar Republic.

Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer was a German physicist who shared the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics with Robert Hofstadter for his discovery of the Mössbauer effect, which is the basis for Mössbauer spectroscopy.

Richard August Carl Emil Erlenmeyer, known simply as Emil Erlenmeyer, was a German chemist known for contributing to the early development of the theory of chemical structure and formulating the Erlenmeyer rule. He also designed the Erlenmeyer flask, a specialized apparatus ubiquitous in chemistry laboratories, which is named after him.

Gustav Otto was a German aircraft and aircraft engine designer and manufacturer.

Herman Sörgel was a German architect. He was known for popularizing the Atlantropa project, a massive construction project which was conceived initially as a solution to Europe's economic and political problems during the early 20th century.

Rudolf Uhlenhaut was a British-German engineer, driving engineer for Mercedes-Benz, and the father of Mercedes-Benz 300 SL and 300 SLR. He had a long association with the Mercedes-Benz racing programme of the 1930s and 1950s, and is best known for his road legal Uhlenhaut Coupé version of the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SLR race car.

Ernst Georg May was a German architect and city planner.

Ludwig Ganghofer was a German writer. He has been called the "most-adapted author in the history of German cinema", as many of his novels were turned into films.

Werner Lothar Mang is a German businessman, plastic surgeon, and television personality. He founded Bodenseeklinik, a private plastic surgery clinic in Lindau, Germany. Additionally, Mang is the chairman of the Professor Mang Foundation, which actively performs surgery on children from socially weak backgrounds. He is also known as Restorator of Lake Constance investing and reviving historic buildings and venues through...

Claude Honoré Désiré Dornier (14 May 1884 – 5 December 1969) was a Franco-German airplane designer and founder of Dornier GmbH. His notable designs include the 12-engine Dornier Do X flying boat, for decades the world's largest and most powerful airplane. He also made several other successful aircraft.

Apostolos-Athanasios "Akis" Tsochatzopoulos was a Greek politician, engineer, and economist. He served as a minister in several Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) cabinets between 1981 and 2004 most notably Minister of the Interior three times and the Minister of National Defence during the Andreas Papandreou and Konstantinos Simitis governments respectively.

Hans Fischer was a German organic chemist and the recipient of the 1930 Nobel Prize for Chemistry "for his researches into the constitution of haemin and chlorophyll and especially for his synthesis of haemin."

Bernd Peter Pischetsrieder is a German automobile engineer and manager.

Kathrin Margrit Lehmann is a Swiss-German member of the Swiss Ice Hockey Federation (SIHF) board of directors and a retired elite ice hockey forward and association football goalkeeper. She is the only sportswoman to have won the premier European cup competition in both ice hockey and association football.

Anne Haug is a German professional triathlete, Ironman World Championship Champion 2019. National Duathlon Champion of the years 2008 and 2009, and vice Triathlon Champion of the year 2009. She represents the clubs TV 1848 Erlangen, Team Icehouse, and LG Stadtwerke München.

Wolfgang Ketterle is a German physicist and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research has focused on experiments that trap and cool atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero, and he led one of the first groups to realize Bose–Einstein condensation in these systems in 1995. For this achievement, as well as early fundamental studies...

Ernst August Friedrich Ruska was a German physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 for his work in electron optics, including the design of the first electron microscope.

Gottfried Böhm was a German architect and sculptor. His reputation is based on creating highly sculptural buildings made of concrete, steel, and glass. Böhm's first independent building was the Cologne chapel "Madonna in the Rubble" (now integrated into Peter Zumthor's design of the Kolumba museum renovation). The chapel was completed in 1949 where a medieval church once stood before it...

Hans Wolfgang Reitzle is a German business executive.

Ludwig Prandtl was a German fluid dynamicist, physicist and aerospace scientist. He was a pioneer in the development of rigorous systematic mathematical analyses which he used for underlying the science of aerodynamics, which have come to form the basis of the applied science of aeronautical engineering. In the 1920s, he developed the mathematical basis for the fundamental principles of subsonic...

Naum Gabo was an influential sculptor, theorist, and key figure in Russia's post-Revolution avant-garde and the subsequent development of twentieth-century sculpture. His work combined geometric abstraction with a dynamic organization of form in small reliefs and constructions, monumental public sculpture and pioneering kinetic works that assimilated new materials such as nylon, wire, lucite and semi-transparent materials, glass and metal. Responding...

Paul Karl Heinrich Klinksik was a German stage and film actor who also worked in radio drama and soundtrack dubbing.

Jürgen Schmidhuber is a German computer scientist noted for his work in the field of artificial intelligence, specifically artificial neural networks. He has been described by media outlets as a leading pioneer of modern artificial intelligence. He is a scientific director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research in Switzerland. He is also director of the Artificial Intelligence...

Ferdinand Hofer is a German actor.

Arthur Scherbius was a German electrical engineer who invented the mechanical cipher Enigma machine. He patented the invention and later sold the machine under the brand name Enigma.

Wilhelm Emil "Willy" Messerschmitt was a German aircraft designer and manufacturer who designed a number of prominent aircraft for the Luftwaffe and civil aviation.

Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim genannt Bechtolsheim is a German electrical engineer, entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer. As of 2025, he's 68th wealthiest according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes with an estimated net worth of US$28.9 billion.

Aurel Vlaicu was a Romanian engineer, inventor, airplane constructor, and early pilot.

Andreas Seidl is a German motorsport engineer and manager. He was previously the chief executive officer of Sauber Motorsport, the team principal of McLaren and the team principal of the hybrid Porsche LMP1 program.

Petr Bystron is a Czech-born German politician. He has been a member of the Bundestag since the 2017 German federal election for the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Carl Paul Gottfried von Linde was a German scientist, engineer, and businessman. He discovered the refrigeration cycle and invented the first industrial-scale air separation and gas liquefaction processes, which led to the first reliable and efficient compressed-ammonia refrigerator in 1876.

Erich Mendelsohn; 21 March 1887 – 15 September 1953) was a German-British architect, known for his expressionist architecture in the 1920s, as well as for developing a dynamic functionalism in his projects for department stores and cinemas. Mendelsohn was a pioneer of the Art Deco and Streamline Moderne architecture, notably with his 1921 Mossehaus design.

Jost Capito is a German former motorsport manager. Capito has been employed in various roles during his career, with his most successful role being Director of Motorsport at Volkswagen.

Walther Rathenau was a German industrialist, writer and politician who served as foreign minister of Germany from February 1922 until his assassination in June 1922.

Dorothee Gisela Renate Maria Bär is a German politician of the Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CSU) who has been serving as the Federal Minister of Research, Technology and Space in the government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz since 2025.

Heinrich Christian Wilhelm Busch was a German humorist, poet, illustrator, and painter. He published wildly innovative illustrated tales that remain influential to this day.

Edmund Rüdiger Stoiber is a German politician who served as the 16th minister-president of the state of Bavaria between 1993 and 2007 and chairman of the Christian Social Union (CSU) between 1999 and 2007. In 2002, he ran for the office of Chancellor of Germany in the federal election, and in one of the narrowest elections in German history lost...

Alfried Felix Alwyn Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was a German industrialist and the last personal sole owner of the company Fried. Krupp. The eldest of eight siblings, he came from the Krupp family on his mother's side and from the von Bohlen und Halbach family on his father's side.

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was a German physicist who first conclusively proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves proposed by James Clerk Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism.

Maria Furtwängler-Burda is a German physician and television actress.

Samantha Cristoforetti OMRI is an Italian European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut, former Italian Air Force pilot and engineer. She is the second of two women sent into space by ESA and the first from Italy. Cristoforetti holds the record for the longest uninterrupted spaceflight by a European astronaut (199 days, 16 hours), and she held the record for the longest...

Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized versions of German...

Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel was a German inventor and mechanical engineer, best known for inventing the diesel engine, which burns diesel fuel; both are named after him.

Eduard Buchner was a German chemist and expert on fermentation (sometimes called a zymologist), awarded the 1907 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on fermentation.

Klaus von Klitzing is a German physicist, known for discovery of the integer quantum Hall effect, for which he was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Norbert Reithofer is a German businessman and former chairman of the board of management (CEO) of BMW. He served as chairman of the supervisory board from 2015 to 2025.

Josef "Sepp" Hochreiter is a German computer scientist. Since 2018 he has led the Institute for Machine Learning at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz after having led the Institute of Bioinformatics from 2006 to 2018. In 2017 he became the head of the Linz Institute of Technology (LIT) AI Lab. Hochreiter is also a founding director of the Institute...

Bernd Fabritius is a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CSU) who has served as a Member of the Bundestag from 2013 to 2017 and again in 2021.

Christian Bernreiter is a German engineer and politician of the Christian Social Union (CSU) who has been serving as State Minister for Housing, Construction and Transport in the cabinet of Minister President Markus Söder since 2022.

Gabriel von Seidl was a German architect and a representative of the historicist style of architecture.

Joachim Frank HonFRMS; born September 12, 1940) is a German-American biophysicist at Columbia University and a Nobel laureate. He is regarded as the founder of single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Richard Henderson. He also made significant contributions to structure and function of the ribosome from bacteria...

Paul Schmitthenner was a German architect, city planner and Professor at the University of Stuttgart.

Gerhard Ertl is a German physicist and a Professor emeritus at the Department of Physical Chemistry, Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Berlin, Germany. Ertl's research laid the foundation of modern surface chemistry, which has helped explain how fuel cells produce energy without pollution, how catalytic converters clean up car exhausts and even why iron rusts, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences...

Giovanni Battista "Gianni" Caproni, 1st Count of Taliedo was an Italian aeronautical engineer, civil engineer, electrical engineer, and aircraft designer who founded the Caproni aircraft-manufacturing company.

Richard Mollier was a German professor of Applied Physics and Mechanics in Göttingen and Dresden, a pioneer of experimental research in thermodynamics, particularly for water, steam, and moist air.