100 Notable alumni of University of Basel

Isaak Iselin was a Swiss philosopher of history and politics.

Thomas Maissen is a professor of modern history at Heidelberg University and co-director of the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context". From 2013 to 2023 he was director of the German Historical Institute in Paris.

Jakob Hermann was a mathematician who worked on problems in classical mechanics. He is the author of Phoronomia, an early treatise on mechanics in Latin, which has been translated by Ian Bruce in 2015-16. In 1729, he proclaimed that it was as easy to graph a locus on the polar coordinate system as it was to graph it on the...

Kurt Fluri is a Swiss politician of FDP.The Liberals (FDP), and a member of the National Council of Switzerland.

Christoph Eymann is a Swiss attorney and former politician who served two terms on the Swiss National Council for the Liberal-Democratic Party from 1991 to 2001 and from 2015 to 2021. His most recent term was succeeded by his former domestic partner and mother of his children, Patricia von Falkenstein. He is also a former member of the Executive Council...

Marcel Salathé is a Swiss digital epidemiologist and currently an associate professor at EPFL. He is the PI of the Lab of Digital Epidemiology, and co-director of the EPFL AI Center. In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Salathé was the most quoted scientist in the Swiss media.

Axel Aubert was a Norwegian chemical engineer who served as Director-General of Norsk Hydro.

Walter Buser was a Swiss politician from the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland (SDP).

Walter Jakob Gehring was a Swiss developmental biologist who was a professor at the Biozentrum Basel of the University of Basel, Switzerland. He obtained his PhD at the University of Zurich in 1965 and after two years as a research assistant of Ernst Hadorn he joined Alan Garen's group at Yale University in New Haven as a postdoctoral fellow.

Johannes Oporinus was a humanist printer in Basel.

Christoph Gerber is a Swiss physicist and professor at the University of Basel. He is the co-inventor of the atomic force microscope (AFM), together with Gerd Binnig and Calvin Quate.

Lilian Uchtenhagen was a Swiss politician and economist. She was one of the ten first women elected to the National Council, the Swiss Parliament's house and first women to be a candidate to the Federal Council, the Government of Switzerland.

Jean Bollack was a French philosopher, philologist and literary critic.

Franziska Schutzbach is a gender researcher and sociologist living in Switzerland.

Leo Jud, known to his contemporaries as Meister Leu, was a Swiss reformer who worked with Huldrych Zwingli in Zürich.

Marina Carobbio Guscetti is a Swiss politician of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland (SP/PS) of which she has been the vice-chairwoman since 1 March 2008. She was the president of the National Council in 2018–2019 and became a Councillor of States in December 2019.

Pascale Baeriswyl is a Swiss diplomat, Ambassador and currently Permanent Representative of Switzerland to the United Nations (UN) in New York. She was the first woman to hold the post of State Secretary of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) and has headed the Swiss Mission to the UN in New York since June 2020. From January 2023...

Hans Martin Sutermeister was a Swiss physician and medical writer, politician, and activist against miscarriages of justice.

Dr Giora Yoseftal was an Israeli politician who held several ministerial portfolios in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Elisabeth Schneider-Schneiter is a Swiss jurist and politician of The Centre (formerly known as the Christian Democratic People's Party).

Johann III Bernoulli, grandson of Johann Bernoulli and son of Johann II Bernoulli, was a Swiss mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and geographer, known around the world as a child prodigy.

Johann Gottlieb Burckhardt was a Swiss psychiatrist and the medical director of a small mental hospital in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel. He is commonly regarded as having performed the first modern psychosurgical operation. Born in Basel, Switzerland, he trained as doctor at the Universities of Basel, Göttingen and Berlin, receiving his medical doctorate in 1860. In the same year...

Thomas Fincke was a Danish mathematician and physicist, and a professor at the University of Copenhagen for more than 60 years.

Nello Celio was a Swiss politician from the Canton of Ticino. He was a member of the Free Democratic Party. He was a member of the Federal Council from 1966 to 1973 and served as the President of the Swiss Confederation in 1972.

Johannes Jacob Wecker was a Swiss physician and philosopher.

János Szentágothai FRS was a Kossuth Prize-winning Hungarian anatomist, Professor, Member of Parliament, and President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.His father was Antal Géza MD, great-grandfather was Alexander Lumniczer (whose brother-in-law was Schöpf-Merei Ágost). The general assembly of UNESCO decided the year 2012 to be dedicated to honour the 100th birthday of János Szentágothai.

Hans-Peter Tschudi was a Swiss politician and member of the Swiss Federal Council (1959–1973) heading the Department of Home Affairs (Swiss interior minister).

Thomas Murner, OFM was an Alsatian satirist, poet and translator.

Stanisław Rewera Potocki was a Polish noble, magnate and military leader. Together with Stefan Czarniecki he was successful in defending the Commonwealth against the invading Swedes and Russians during The Deluge. He was the most trusted advisor of King John II Casimir.

Ernst Louis Étienne Laspeyres was a German economist. He was Professor ordinarius of economics and statistics or State Sciences and cameralistics (public finance and administration) in Basel, Riga, Dorpat (now Tartu), Karlsruhe, and finally for 26 years in Gießen. Laspeyres was the scion of a Huguenot family of originally Gascon descent which had settled in Berlin in the 17th century,...

Carl Christian von Weizsäcker is a German economist who currently works as a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods (MPI-EG), having emerited from the University of Cologne in 2003. Throughout his career, von Weizsäcker has worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the universities of Heidelberg, Bielefeld, Bonn, Bern and Cologne. His...

Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner was a German astrophysicist who studied optical illusions. He was also an early psychical investigator. He discovered the Zöllner illusion where lines that are parallel appear diagonal.

Johann II Bernoulli was the youngest of the three sons of the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli.

Otto Anton Stich was a Swiss professor and politician. He served as a member of the Swiss Federal Council from 1984 to 1995 and held the Swiss presidency in 1988 and 1994.

Wilhelm Burgdorfer was a Swiss-American scientist and an international leader in the field of medical entomology. He discovered the bacterial pathogen that causes Lyme disease, a spirochete named Borrelia burgdorferi in his honor.

Thomas Erastus was a Swiss physician and Calvinist theologian. He wrote 100 theses (later reduced to 75) in which he argued that the sins committed by Christians should be punished by the State, and that the Church should not withhold sacraments as a form of punishment. They were published in 1589, after his death, with the title Explicatio gravissimae quaestionis....

Nicolaus II Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician as were his father Johann Bernoulli and one of his brothers, Daniel Bernoulli. He was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family.

Beatrice Weder di Mauro is a Swiss economist who is currently Professor of economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Research Professor and Distinguished Fellow-in-residence at the Emerging Markets Institute of INSEAD Singapore, and senior fellow at the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER). Since 2018, she also serves as President of the...

Bruno S. Frey is a Swiss economist and visiting professor for Political Economy at the University of Basel. Frey's research topics include political economy and happiness economics, with his published work including concepts derived from Psychology, Sociology, Jurisprudence, History, Arts, and Theology.

Hermann Robert Dietrich was a German politician of the liberal German Democratic Party and served as a minister during the Weimar Republic.

Sibel Arslan is a Turkish-born Swiss lawyer and politician who currently serves on the National Council (Switzerland) for the movement BastA! (Green Party). There she concurrently also is a representative to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe since 2020. She previously served on the Grand Council of Basel-Stadt between 2005 and 2016.

Mirjana Spoljaric Egger is a Swiss-Croatian diplomat. Since October 2022, she has served as the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Emil Abderhalden was a Swiss biochemist and physiologist. His main findings, though disputed already in the 1910s, were not finally rejected until the late 1990s. Whether his misleading findings were based on fraud or simply the result of a lack of scientific rigour remains unclear. Abderhalden's drying pistol, used in chemistry, was first described by one of his students in...

Charles Albert Gobat was a Swiss lawyer, educational administrator, and politician who jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize with Élie Ducommun in 1902 for their leadership of the Permanent International Peace Bureau.

Hans Lukas "Luc" Hoffmann was a Swiss ornithologist, conservationist, and philanthropist. He co-founded the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), helped establish the Ramsar Convention for the protection of wetlands, and set up the Tour du Valat research centre in the Camargue area of France.

Heinrich Khunrath, or Dr. Henricus Khunrath as he was also called, was a German physician, hermetic philosopher, and alchemist. Frances Yates considered him to be a link between the philosophy of John Dee and Rosicrucianism. His name, in the spelling "Henricus Künraht" was used as a pseudonym for the 1670 publisher of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of Baruch Spinoza.

John Howard Yoder was an American Mennonite theologian and ethicist best known for his defense of Christian pacifism. His most influential book was The Politics of Jesus, which was first published in 1972. Yoder was a Mennonite and wrote from an Anabaptist perspective. He spent the latter part of his career teaching at the University of Notre Dame.

Johann Arndt was a German Lutheran theologian and mystic who wrote several influential books of devotional Christianity. Although reflective of the period of Lutheran Orthodoxy, he is seen as a forerunner of Pietism, a movement within Lutheranism that gained strength in the late 17th century.

Roland Wiesendanger is a German physicist, specializing in nanoscience. Since 1993 he has been a full professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany.

Thomas Gustav Borer is a Swiss management consultant, lobbyist and former diplomat. From 1996 to 1999 he headed the Switzerland – Second World War Task Force. He then was Switzerland's ambassador to Germany until 2002.

Carl Jacob Burckhardt was a Swiss diplomat and historian. His career alternated between periods of academic historical research and diplomatic postings; the most prominent of the latter were League of Nations High Commissioner for the Free City of Danzig (1937–39) and President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (1945–48).

Tadeusz Reichstein, also known as Tadeus Reichstein, was a Polish-Swiss chemist and a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate (1950), which was awarded for his work on the isolation of cortisone.

Kurt Wüthrich is a Swiss chemist/biophysicist and Nobel Chemistry laureate, known for developing nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods for studying biological macromolecules.

Werner Arber is a Swiss microbiologist and geneticist. Along with American researchers Hamilton Smith and Daniel Nathans, Werner Arber shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of restriction endonucleases. Their work would lead to the development of recombinant DNA technology.

Franciscus Sylvius was a Dutch physician and scientist (chemist, physiologist and anatomist) who was an early champion of Descartes', Van Helmont's and William Harvey's work and theories. He was one of the earliest defenders of the theory of circulation of the blood in the Netherlands, and commonly falsely cited as the inventor of gin – others pinpoint the origin of...

Emmerich de Vattel was a philosopher, diplomat, and jurist.

Sebastian Brant was a German humanist and satirist. He is best known for his satire Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools).

Paul Hermann Müller, also known as Pauly Mueller, was a Swiss chemist who received the 1948 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine for his 1939 discovery of insecticidal qualities and use of DDT in the control of vector diseases such as malaria and yellow fever.

Wolfhart Pannenberg was a German Lutheran theologian. He made a number of significant contributions to modern theology, including his concept of history as a form of revelation centered on the resurrection of Christ, which has been widely debated in both Protestant and Catholic theology, as well as by non-Christian thinkers.

Iona Emmanuilovich Yakir was a Red Army commander and one of the world's major military reformers between World War I and World War II. He was an early and major military victim of the Great Purge, alongside Mikhail Tukhachevsky.

John Maurice of Nassau, called "the Brazilian" for his fruitful period as governor of Dutch Brazil, was Count and (from 1664) Prince of Nassau-Siegen. He served as Herrenmeister (equivalent to Grand Master) of the Order of Saint John (Bailiwick of Brandenburg) from 1652 until his death in 1679.

Christoph R. Hörstel is a German publicist and political activist. Hörstel founded the German Centre (DM) political party which he led until his departure from the party in October 2017 under internal criticism of his leadership style. In November 2017, Hörstel revived a short-lived political party that he had originally founded in 2013, The New Centre (NM), which he leads...

Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was a French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters. He became the director of the Académie des Sciences and the first president of the Prussian Academy of Science, at the invitation of Frederick the Great.

Johann Jakob Bachofen was a Swiss antiquarian, jurist, philologist, anthropologist, and professor of Roman law at the University of Basel from 1841 to 1844.

Leonhard Euler was a Swiss polymath who was active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, logician, geographer, music theorist and engineer. He founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made influential discoveries in many other branches of mathematics, such as analytic number theory, complex analysis, and infinitesimal calculus. He also introduced much of modern mathematical terminology and notation, including...

Michael Servetus was a Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and Renaissance humanist. He was the first European to correctly describe the function of pulmonary circulation, as discussed in Christianismi Restitutio (1553). He was a polymath versed in many sciences: mathematics, astronomy and meteorology, geography, human anatomy, medicine and pharmacology, as well as jurisprudence, translation, poetry, and the scholarly study of the...

Alexander Israel Helphand, better known as Alexander Parvus, was a Russian-born Marxist theorist, journalist, and activist who became a prominent figure in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).

Auguste Antoine Piccard was a Swiss physicist, inventor and explorer known for his record-breaking hydrogen balloon flights, with which he studied the Earth's upper atmosphere and became the first person to enter the stratosphere. Piccard was also known for his invention of the first bathyscaphe, FNRS-2, with which he made a number of unmanned dives in 1948 to explore the...

Jacques Piccard was a Swiss oceanographer and engineer, known for having developed submarines for studying ocean currents. In the Challenger Deep, he and Lieutenant Don Walsh of the United States Navy were the first people to explore the deepest known part of the world's ocean, and the deepest known location on the surface of Earth's crust, the Mariana Trench, located...

Jacob Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician. He sided with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz during the Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy and was an early proponent of Leibnizian calculus, to which he made numerous contributions. A member of the Bernoulli family, he, along with his brother Johann, was one of the founders of the calculus of variations. He also discovered the fundamental mathematical constant...

Johann Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family. He is known for his contributions to infinitesimal calculus and educating Leonhard Euler in the pupil's youth.

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychologist who founded the school of analytical psychology. He was a prolific author of over twenty books, illustrator, and correspondent, and academic, best known for his concept of archetypes. Widely considered one of the most influential psychologists of the early 20th century, and of all time, Jung's work has fostered not...

Johann Samuel König was a German mathematician.

Jacques Dubochet is a retired Swiss biophysicist. He is a former researcher at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and an honorary professor of biophysics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Aurelia Cäcilia Katharina Frick commonly known as Aurelia Frick is a Liechtensteiner politician who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Education and Culture of Liechtenstein from 2009 to 2019.

Eva Herzog is a Swiss politician who has represented the Basel-Stadt canton in the Council of States since 2019 and served as President of the Council in 2023–2024. She is a member of the Social Democratic Party (SP/PS).

Mahmut Gazi Yaşargil was a Turkish-Swiss medical scientist and neurosurgeon. He collaborated with Raymond M. P. Donaghy M.D at the University of Vermont in developing microneurosurgery. Yaşargil treated epilepsy and brain tumours with instruments of his own design. From 1953 until his retirement in 1993, he was first resident, chief resident and then professor and chairman of the Department of...

Prince Janusz Radziwiłł, also known as Janusz the Second or Janusz the Younger was a noble and magnate in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Throughout his life he occupied a number of posts in the state administration, including that of Court Chamberlain of Lithuania (from 1633), Field Hetman of Lithuania (from 1646) and Grand Hetman of Lithuania (from 1654). He was also...

Otto Brunfels was a German theologian and botanist. Carl von Linné listed him among the "Fathers of Botany".

Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt was a Swiss historian of art and culture and an influential figure in the historiography of both fields. His best known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). He is known as one of the major progenitors of cultural history. Sigfried Giedion described Burckhardt's achievement in the following terms: "The great discoverer of...

Johannes Althusius was a German–Dutch jurist and Calvinist political philosopher.

Michael Maier was a German physician and counsellor to Rudolf II Habsburg. He was a learned alchemist, epigramist, and amateur composer.

Marion Hedda Ilse Gräfin von Dönhoff was a German journalist and publisher who participated in the resistance against Nazism, along with Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, and Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. After the war, she became one of Germany's leading journalists and intellectuals, working for over 55 years as an editor and later publisher of...

Mateusz Jakub Morawiecki is a Polish economist and politician who served as Prime Minister of Poland from 2017 to 2023. A member of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, he previously served in the cabinet of prime minister Beata Szydło as deputy prime minister from 2015 to 2017, Minister of Development from 2015 to 2018 and Minister of Finance from...

Maximilian Schell was a Swiss actor, theatre director, filmmaker, and musician of Austrian origin. He was one of the most internationally-acclaimed German-speaking actors of his generation, earning accolades for his work on both screen and stage. Born and initially raised in Vienna, where his parents were involved in the arts, he grew up surrounded by performance and literature. While he...

Peter Heinz Hermann Duesberg was a German-American molecular biologist and a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his early research into the genetic aspects of cancer. He was a proponent of AIDS denialism, the claim that HIV does not cause AIDS.

Daniel Bernoulli FRS was a Swiss mathematician and physicist and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family from Basel. He is particularly remembered for his applications of mathematics to mechanics, especially fluid mechanics, and for his pioneering work in probability and statistics. His name is commemorated in the Bernoulli's principle, a particular example of the conservation...

Johann Jakob Balmer was a Swiss mathematician best known for his work in physics, the Balmer series of hydrogen atom.

Felix Platter was a Swiss physician, botanist, and diarist. He is known for his research in several areas of medicine, including ophthalmology, psychiatry and paleopathology.

Johann Bauhin (12 December 1541 – 26 October 1613) was a Swiss botanist, born in Basel. He was the son of physician Jean Bauhin and the brother of physician and botanist Gaspard Bauhin.

Urs Widmer was a Swiss novelist, playwright, an essayist, and a short story writer.

Gaspard Bauhin or Caspar Bauhin, was a Swiss botanist whose Pinax theatri botanici (1623) described thousands of plants and classified them in a manner that draws comparisons to the later binomial nomenclature of Linnaeus. He was a disciple of the famous Italian physician Girolamo Mercuriale and he also worked on human anatomical nomenclature.

Uta Ranke-Heinemann was a German theologian, academic, and author. In 1969, she was the first woman in the world to be habilitated in Catholic theology. She held a chair of ancient Church history and the New Testament at the University of Duisburg-Essen. When her license to teach was revoked by the bishop because of her critical position in matters of...

Caleb Gattegno was an educator, psychologist, and mathematician. He is considered one of the most influential and prolific mathematics educators of the twentieth century. He is best known for introducing new approaches to teaching and learning mathematics (Visible & Tangible Math), foreign languages (The Silent Way) and reading (Words in Color). Gattegno also developed pedagogical materials for each of these...

Johann Reuchlin, sometimes called Johannes, was a German Catholic humanist and a scholar of Greek and Hebrew, whose work also took him to modern-day Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and France. Most of Reuchlin's career centered on advancing German knowledge of Greek and Hebrew.

Thomas Bartholin was a Danish physician, mathematician, and theologian. He discovered the lymphatic system in humans and advanced the theory of refrigeration anesthesia, being the first to describe it scientifically.

Ole Worm, who often went by the Latinized form of his name Olaus Wormius, was a Danish physician, natural historian and antiquary. He was a professor at the University of Copenhagen where he taught Greek, Latin, physics and medicine.

Huldrych or Ulrich Zwingli was a Swiss Christian theologian, musician, and leader of the Reformation in Switzerland. Born during a time of emerging Swiss patriotism and increasing criticism of the Swiss mercenary system, he attended the University of Vienna and the University of Basel, a scholarly center of Renaissance humanism. He continued his studies while he served as a pastor...

Gottfried Schatz was a Swiss-Austrian biochemist.