100 Notable alumni of University of Bonn

Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein was a German prince who became a member of the British royal family through his marriage to Princess Helena of the United Kingdom, the fifth child and third daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

George was king of Saxony and member of the House of Wettin.

Markus Feldenkirchen is a German journalist and writer.

Barbara Anne Hendricks is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who served as Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2013 until 2018.

Wolfgang Friedrich Ischinger is a German diplomat who served as chairman of the Munich Security Conference from 2008 to 2022.

Daniel Jakob Lindemann is a German who lives and performs in South Korea as a television personality and marketing manager. He was a cast member in the talk show Non-Summit.

Thomas Enders is a German business executive who served as the chief executive of Airbus (formerly EADS, Airbus Group) from 2012 until 2019. Since 2019, Thomas has been the president of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP).

Moses Hess was a German-Jewish philosopher, a writer on socialism, and in later life, a forerunner of the political movement that became known as Zionism. His intellectual journey included significant contributions to the early development of socialist theory, and he was a close collaborator and an important influence on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In his later life, Hess's focus...

Bernd Stelter is a German comedian, a writer and a television presenter.

Ju Gau-jeng was a Taiwanese lawyer and politician who served in the Legislative Yuan from 1987 to 1999. He was known for his combative personality, and helped found two political parties.

Ulrich Wolfgang Kelber is a German former politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who served as the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information from 2019 to 2024. From 2000 to 2019, he was the member of the Bundestag for Bonn.

Prince Friedrich Karl Nikolaus of Prussia was the son of Prince Charles of Prussia and Princess Marie of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. He was the grandson of King Frederick William III of Prussia and nephew of Frederick William IV and William I. Friedrich Karl is highly regarded as a military commander.

Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, GCB, GCSI, GCIE, PC, was a British statesman, Conservative politician and poet who used the pseudonym Owen Meredith. During his tenure as Viceroy of India between 1876 and 1880, Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. He served as British Ambassador to France from 1887 to 1891.

Adolph Kolping was a German Catholic priest and the founder of the Kolping Association. He led the movement for providing and promoting social support for workers in industrialized cities while also working to promote the dignities of workers in accordance with the social magisterium of the faith. He was called Gesellenvater (the Journeymen's Father).

Felix Christian Klein was a German mathematician, mathematics educator and historian of mathematics, known for his work in group theory, complex analysis, non-Euclidean geometry, and the associations between geometry and group theory. His 1872 Erlangen program classified geometries by their basic symmetry groups and was an influential synthesis of much of the mathematics of the time.

Navid Kermani is a German writer and orientalist. He is the author of several novels as well as books and essays on Islam, the Middle East and Christian-Muslim dialogue. He has won numerous prizes for his literary and academic work, including the Peace Prize of the German Publishers' Association on 18 June 2015.

Nikolaus Blome is a German journalist.

Margarethe Schreinemakers is a German television presenter, talk show host and journalist.

Hermann Emil Louis Fischer FRS FRSE FCS was a German chemist and 1902 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He discovered the Fischer esterification. He also developed the Fischer projection, a symbolic way of drawing asymmetric carbon atoms. He also hypothesized lock and key mechanism of enzyme action. He never used his first given name, and was known throughout...

Leopold Kronecker was a German mathematician who worked on number theory, abstract algebra and logic, and criticized Georg Cantor's work on set theory. Heinrich Weber quoted Kronecker as having said, "Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk" ("God made the integers, all else is the work of man"). Kronecker was a student and life-long friend...

Wilhelm Marx was a German judge, lawyer, and politician who twice served as chancellor of Germany during the Weimar Republic, from 1923 to 1925 and again from 1926 to 1928. He also briefly held the position of Minister-President of Prussia in 1925. A leading figure in the Centre Party, he served as its chairman from 1922 to 1928. With a...

Leah Goldberg or Lea Goldberg was a prolific Hebrew-language poet, author, playwright, literary translator, illustrator and painter, and comparative literary researcher.

Markus Gabriel is a German philosopher and author at the University of Bonn. In addition to his more specialized work, he has also written popular books about philosophical issues.

Shary Cheyenne Reeves is a German actress, television presenter and former professional football player.

Granville Stanley Hall was an American psychologist and educator who earned the first doctorate in psychology awarded in the United States of America at Harvard University in the nineteenth century. His interests focused on human life span development and evolutionary theory. Hall was the first president of the American Psychological Association and the first president of Clark University. A 2002...

Axel Honneth is a German philosopher who is the Professor for Social Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Jack B. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities in the department of philosophy at Columbia University. He was also director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany between 2001 and 2018.

Clemens Wenzeslaus Brentano was a German poet and novelist, and a major figure of German Romanticism. He was the uncle, via his brother Christian, of Franz and Lujo Brentano.

Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff Jr. was a Dutch physical chemist. A highly influential theoretical chemist, in 1901 Van 't Hoff won the first the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "[for his] discovery of the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions". His pioneering work helped found the modern theory of chemical affinity, chemical equilibrium, chemical kinetics, and chemical...

Thomas Karl Leonard Kemmerich is a German politician, formerly of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) who served as the Minister-President of Thuringia from 5 February to 4 March 2020. With a tenure of only 28 days (3 days if his time as acting officeholder is excluded), he has been both the shortest-serving Minister-President of Thuringia and the shortest-serving head of...

Carl Christian Schurz was a German-American revolutionary and an American statesman, journalist, and reformer. He migrated to the United States after the German revolutions of 1848–1849 and became a prominent member of the new Republican Party. After serving as a Union general in the American Civil War, he helped found the short-lived Liberal Republican Party and became a prominent advocate...

Alexander Sebastian Léonce von der Wenge Graf Lambsdorff, commonly known as Alexander Graf Lambsdorff is a German politician of the Free Democratic Party of Germany (FDP), part of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, who has been serving as the German ambassador to Russia since 2023.

Maryna Sergiivna Viazovska is a Ukrainian mathematician known for her work in sphere packing. She is a full professor and Chair of Number Theory at the Institute of Mathematics of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. She was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022.

Karin Prien is a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who has been serving Federal Minister for Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth in the government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz since 2025; she is the first woman of Jewish ancestry to head a ministry in a post-war German government.

Wolfgang Köhler was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology.

Aby Moritz Warburg was a German art historian and cultural theorist who founded the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Warburg Library for Cultural Studies), a private library, which was later moved to the Warburg Institute, London. At the heart of his research was the legacy of the classical world, and the transmission of classical representation, in the most varied areas of Western...

Prince Wilhelm Eitel Friedrich Christian Karl of Prussia was the second son of Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany by his first wife, Princess Augusta Viktoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. He was born and died in Potsdam, Germany.

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...

Rainer Maria Woelki is a German Catholic prelate who has served as Archbishop of Cologne since 2014. This came following his election by the Cathedral Chapter to succeed Joachim Meisner. He previously served as Archbishop of Berlin. He was made a cardinal in 2012.

Maria Grazia Alice Eleonora Kinsky-Mockridge, commonly known as Margie Kinsky, is an Italian actress and cabaret artist who works in Germany.

Rudolf Albert Scharping is a German lawyer and politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet was a German mathematician. In number theory, he proved special cases of Fermat's Last Theorem and created analytic number theory. In analysis, he advanced the theory of Fourier series and was one of the first to give the modern formal definition of a function. In mathematical physics, he studied potential theory, boundary-value problems, heat diffusion,...

Norbert Alois Röttgen is a German lawyer and politician who served as Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2009 to 2012. A member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), he placed third in the January 2021 CDU leadership election, then second in the December 2021 leadership election. From...

Peter Scholze is a German mathematician known for his work in arithmetic geometry. He has been a professor in the University of Bonn since 2012 and co-director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics since 2018. He has been called one of the leading mathematicians in the world. In 2018, he won the Fields Medal, an award regarded as the...

Hermann Ebbinghaus was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory. Ebbinghaus discovered the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He was the first person to describe the learning curve. He was the father of the neo-Kantian philosopher Julius Ebbinghaus.

Karl Heinrich Lübke was a German politician, who served as president of West Germany from 1959 to 1969.

Ulrich Wickert is a Japanese-born German journalist. He is one of the best-known broadcasters in Germany.

Max Bruch was a German Romantic composer, violinist, teacher, and conductor who wrote more than 200 works, including three violin concertos, the first of which has become a staple of the violin repertoire.

James Robertson Justice was a British actor. He often portrayed pompous authority figures in comedies, including each of the seven films in the Doctor series. He also co-starred with Gregory Peck in several adventure movies, notably The Guns of Navarone. Born in south-east London to a Scottish father, he became prominent in Scottish public life, helping to launch Scottish Television...

Christian IX was King of Denmark from 15 November 1863 until his death in 1906. From 1863 to 1864, he was concurrently Duke of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg.

Andrea Maria Nahles is a former German politician who has been the director of the Federal Employment Agency (BA) since 2022.

Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson is an Icelandic historian and politician who served as the sixth president of Iceland from 2016 to 2024.

Thilo Sarrazin is a German politician and former member of the SPD, writer, senator of finance for the State of Berlin from January 2002 until April 2009, former member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank until 2010.

Ferdinand Benedikt von Schirach is a German lawyer and writer. He published his first short stories at the age of forty-five. Shortly thereafter he became one of Germany's most successful authors. His books, which have been translated into more than 35 languages, have sold millions of copies worldwide and have made him "an internationally celebrated star of German literature."

Ernest II was Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha from 29 January 1844 to his death in 1893. He was born in Coburg to Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and Princess Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. His father became Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (as Ernest I) in 1826 through an exchange of territories.

Wilhelm II was the last German Emperor (German: Deutscher Kaiser) and King of Prussia from 1888 until his abdication in 1918. His fall from power marked the end of the German Empire as well as the Hohenzollern dynasty's 500-year rule over Prussia.

Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was the husband of Queen Victoria and consort of the British monarch from their marriage on 10 February 1840 until his death in 1861. Victoria granted him the title Prince Consort in 1857.

Frederick III, or Friedrich III, was German Emperor and King of Prussia for 99 days from 9 March 1888 until his death in June that year, during the Year of the Three Emperors.

Christian Wolfgang Lindner is a German retired politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) who was the Federal Minister of Finance from 2021 until his dismissal in 2024 during a government crisis. Serving from 2013 to 2025, Lindner was the longest-serving party-leader of the FDP and a Member of the Bundestag (MdB) for North Rhine-Westphalia from 2017 to 2025, having...

Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays. He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art". Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces...

Wilhelm, German Crown Prince, Crown Prince of Prussia, was the eldest child of the last German emperor, Wilhelm II, and his consort Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein. As Emperor Wilhelm's heir, he was the last German Crown Prince and Crown Prince of Prussia, until the abolition of the monarchy.

Max Ernst was a German-born painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces...

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher who started his career as a classical philologist and turned to philosophy early in his academic career. In 1869, aged 24, he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel. Plagued by health problems for most of his life, he resigned from the university in 1879. He afterward lived as...

Otto Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr von der Wenge Graf Lambsdorff, known as Otto Graf Lambsdorff, was a German politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). He was the German Federal Minister of Economics from 1977 to 1984, when he resigned due to corruption allegations.

Carlo Masala is a German political scientist, lecturer and researcher. He is currently professor of international politics at the Bundeswehr University Munich, lecturer at the University of Munich, and lecturer as well as member of the senate of the Munich School of Political Science. He has become known to a wider audience through frequent appearances on German television as an...

Marco Buschmann is a German lawyer and politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) who served as Federal Minister of Justice in Chancellor Olaf Scholz's cabinet from 2021 to November 2024. He served as a member of the Bundestag from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia from 2009 to 2013 and again since 2017 to 2025.

Norbert Walter-Borjans, also known by the nickname NoWaBo, is a German economist and politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who served as co-leader of the SPD (alongside Saskia Esken) from 2019 to 2021. He served as State Minister of Finance of North Rhine-Westphalia from 2010 until 2017.

Hans-Georg Maaßen is a German civil servant and lawyer. From 1 August 2012 to 8 November 2018, he served as the President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic security agency and one of three agencies in the German Intelligence Community. He was removed from his Federal role in 2018 after controversial comments exonerating far...

Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass was a German mathematician often cited as the "father of modern analysis". Despite leaving university without a degree, he studied mathematics and trained as a school teacher, eventually teaching mathematics, physics, botany and gymnastics. He later received an honorary doctorate and became professor of mathematics in Berlin.

Annette Schavan is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). She was the Federal Minister of Education and Research in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2005 to 2013, when she resigned following the revocation of her doctorate due to plagiarism. From 2014 until 2018 she served as the German Ambassador to the Holy See. From April...

Guido Westerwelle was a German politician who served as foreign minister in the second cabinet of Chancellor Angela Merkel and Vice-Chancellor of Germany from 2009 to 2011, being the first openly gay person to hold any of these positions. He also led the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) from 2001 until he stepped down in 2011. A lawyer by profession,...

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groundbreaking work in electronic music, having been called the "father of electronic music", for introducing controlled chance (aleatory techniques) into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.

August Heinrich Hoffmann was a German poet associated with the Young Germany movement. He is best known for writing "Das Lied der Deutschen", whose third stanza is now the national anthem of Germany, and a number of popular children's songs.

Gerhard Fritz Kurt Schröder is a German former politician and lobbyist who served as Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005. From 1999 to 2004, he was also the Leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). As chancellor, he led a coalition government of the SPD and Alliance 90/The Greens. Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for...

Sebastian Thrun is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He was chief executive officer of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and is chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google vice president and Fellow, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and before that at Carnegie Mellon University. At Google, he co-founded Google X along with Yoky...

Gottfried Benn was a German poet, essayist, and physician. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. He was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1951.

Joachim-Friedrich Martin Josef Merz is a German politician who has served as Chancellor of Germany since 6 May 2025. He has also served as Leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since January 2022, leading the CDU/CSU (Union) parliamentary group as Leader of the Opposition in the Bundestag from February 2022 to May 2025.

Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.

Harald Lesch is a German physicist, astronomer, natural philosopher, author, television presenter, professor of physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) and professor of natural philosophy at the Munich University of Philosophy.

Frederik Pleitgen is a German journalist and correspondent for CNN International.

Bernd Lucke is a German economist, professor, author and former politician. He co-founded the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in 2013 and served as the party's federal chairman until July 2015, when he was displaced and left the party soon after. He had been elected a member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the AfD in 2014 and served the five-year...

Hendrik Streeck is a German researcher of human immunodeficiency virus, epidemiologist and clinical trialist. He is professor of virology and the director of the Institute of Virology and HIV Research at the University Bonn.

Christian Johann Heinrich Heine was a German poet, writer and literary critic. He is best known outside Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of Lieder (art songs) by composers such as Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert.

Karl Marx was a German philosopher, social and political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (written with Friedrich Engels), and his three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894), a critique of classical political economy which employs his theory of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his life's work....

Prince Wilhelm Friedrich Franz Joseph Christian Olaf of Prussia was the eldest child of Wilhelm, German Crown Prince, and Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. At his birth, he was second in line to the German throne and was expected to succeed to the throne after the deaths of his grandfather, Emperor Wilhelm II, and his father, Crown Prince Wilhelm, although both...

Heinrich Aloysius Maria Elisabeth Brüning was a German Centre Party politician and academic, who served as the chancellor of Germany during the Weimar Republic from 1930 to 1932.

Jean-Baptiste Nicolas Robert Schuman was a Luxembourg-born French statesman. Schuman was a Christian democratic (Popular Republican Movement) political thinker and activist. Twice Prime Minister of France, a reformist Minister of Finance and a Foreign Minister, he was instrumental in building postwar European and trans-Atlantic institutions and was one of the founders of the European Communities, the Council of Europe and...

Armin Laschet is a German politician who served as Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia from 27 June 2017 to 26 October 2021. He served as Leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) from 22 January 2021 to 31 January 2022. He was elected to the German Bundestag following the 2021 German federal election.

Justus Freiherr von Liebig was a German scientist who made major contributions to the theory, practice, and pedagogy of chemistry, as well as to agricultural and biological chemistry; he is considered one of the principal founders of organic chemistry. As a professor at the University of Giessen, he devised the modern laboratory-oriented teaching method, and for such innovations, he is...

Frederick II was the last sovereign Grand Duke of Baden, reigning from 1907 until the abolition of the German monarchies in 1918. The Weimar-era state of Baden originated from the area of the Grand Duchy of Baden. He was a first cousin of Wilhelm II, a second cousin of Alexander III of Russia, and an uncle of Gustaf VI Adolf.

Harald zur Hausen NAS EASA APS was a German virologist. He carried out research on cervical cancer and discovered the role of papilloma viruses in cervical cancer, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008. He was chairman of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) in Heidelberg.

Franz Uri Boas was a German-American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. He was a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical particularism and cultural relativism.

Carl David Alfred Weber was a German economist, geographer, sociologist, philosopher, and theoretician of culture whose work was influential in the development of modern economic geography.

Klaus Kinkel was a German statesman, civil servant, diplomat and lawyer who served as the minister of Foreign affairs (1992–1998) and the vice chancellor of Germany (1993–1998) in the government of Helmut Kohl.

Ernst Carl Julius Albrecht was a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union and a former high-ranking European civil servant. He was one of the first European civil servants appointed in 1958 and served as director-general of the Directorate-General for Competition from 1967 to 1970. He served as Minister President of the state of Lower Saxony from 1976 to 1990....

Romano Guardini was an Italian, naturalized German Catholic priest, philosopher and theologian.

Reinhard Genzel ForMemRS is a German astrophysicist, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, a professor at LMU and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy", which he shared with Andrea Ghez and...

Jürgen Todenhöfer is a German author, journalist, politician, executive and former judge.

Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer was a German statesman and politician who served as the first chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963. From 1946 to 1966, he was the first leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a newly founded Christian democratic party, which became the dominant force in the country under his leadership. Adenauer is considered one of...

Theodor Schwann was a German physician and physiologist. His most significant contribution to biology is considered to be the extension of cell theory to animals. Other contributions include the discovery of Schwann cells in the peripheral nervous system, the discovery and study of pepsin, the discovery of the organic nature of yeast, and the invention of the term "metabolism".