The University of Wrocław counts ten Nobel Prize laureates in its history - a number given by the university itself and repeated by encyclopaedias. It is worth clarifying straight away what this number actually means, because "connected with the university" is a broad category: it includes people born in the city who grew up here and attended secondary school, but also professors who spent only a few years at a Wrocław chair before the prize and their further career took them elsewhere.

Ten Nobel laureates - who exactly counts

The list given by the University of Wrocław includes: Theodor Mommsen (Literature, 1902), Philipp Lenard (Physics, 1905), Eduard Buchner (Chemistry, 1907), Paul Ehrlich (Medicine, 1908), Fritz Haber (Chemistry, 1918), Friedrich Bergius (Chemistry, 1931), Erwin Schrödinger (Physics, 1933), Otto Stern (Physics, 1943), Max Born (Physics, 1954) and Hans Georg Dehmelt (Physics, 1989).

That is ten names, but ten different biographies. Some of these people were born in Wrocław and spent their childhood here before leaving to study elsewhere. Others arrived in the city already as mature scientists, took up a chair at the university and worked here for a certain time, before moving on elsewhere. Sources that give only the number ten do not always spell out this distinction, so it is easy to get the impression that all of them were "born-and-bred people of Wrocław." That is not the case.

A distinction should also be drawn between Nobel laureates connected with the university and other outstanding figures associated with the city who did not receive a Nobel Prize. Edith Stein, a philosopher and Carmelite nun, was born in Wrocław in 1891, but is known as a saint of the Catholic Church, canonised in 1998, not as a Nobel laureate. Similarly, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born in Wrocław in 1906 and executed by the Germans in 1945, is a historical figure of the first rank, but does not appear on the list of Nobel laureates. Both are sometimes confused with the group of laureates by anyone reading the city's history only superficially.

Fritz Haber - born in Wrocław, creator of ammonia synthesis

Fritz Haber is one of the few on this list who really were born in Wrocław - he came into the world here on 9 December 1868, the son of the merchant Siegfried Haber. He attended the St Elizabeth Gymnasium in Wrocław, before leaving to study in Heidelberg and Berlin. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for the synthesis of ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen - a method he developed between 1905 and 1910 and which was later, together with Carl Bosch, put into industrial production. The Haber-Bosch process, as it is called in textbooks today, made possible the mass production of artificial fertilisers and remains the basis of world agriculture. Haber's biography also has a dark side: during the First World War he directed the German chemical weapons programme, which still stirs controversy around his figure, regardless of the significance of the discovery for which he received the prize.

Max Born - a childhood on the square that now bears his name

Max Born was born in Wrocław on 11 December 1882. His father, Gustav Jacob Born, was a professor of comparative anatomy and embryology at the University of Wrocław, so young Max grew up in an academic environment and studied at the local King William Gymnasium, before leaving to study at other universities. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics only in 1954, for formulating the statistical interpretation of the wave function in quantum mechanics - he was the one who showed that the square of the modulus of the wave function corresponds to the probability density of finding a particle at a given place, which gave Schrödinger's mathematical equations physical meaning. The city commemorates Born with a plaque on his family home at 4 Plac Wolności, unveiled in 2002, and with the name of the square.

Erwin Schrödinger - a brief but significant episode at the chair

Erwin Schrödinger is an example of a completely different type of connection with the city: he was not born in Wrocław and did not grow up here, but he was a professor at the local university (then the Silesian Frederick William University) in 1921. His Wrocław episode was brief, but it was precisely during this period that the foundations of his later work on wave mechanics took shape. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, sharing it with Paul Dirac, for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory and its applications - in practice, for the mathematical formulation of wave mechanics, known today as the Schrödinger equation. His case shows well why the number "ten Nobel laureates" requires explanation: if only those born in the city were counted, Schrödinger would not be among them.

The remaining laureates - brief episodes and lesser-known names

The rest of the list consists of names that appear less often in popular accounts of Wrocław, though each has its place in the history of science. Theodor Mommsen, a historian of antiquity, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902. Philipp Lenard, a physicist honoured in 1905 for his work on cathode rays, and Eduard Buchner, a chemist honoured in 1907 for research into cell-free fermentation, are further figures from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries connected with the university through a period of work at the local chair. Paul Ehrlich, laureate in Medicine in 1908, laid the foundations of modern chemotherapy and immunology. Friedrich Bergius, honoured in 1931 for methods of high-pressure chemistry, and Otto Stern, a physicist honoured in 1943 for the discovery of the magnetic moment of the proton, complete the group from the first half of the 20th century. The most recent of the ten is Hans Georg Dehmelt, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics only in 1989 for the development of methods for trapping single ions.

Where the discrepancy in the numbers comes from

When different sources give different numbers of Nobel laureates connected with Wrocław, the reason usually lies in the criterion adopted. If only people born within the boundaries of the present-day city are counted, the list is shorter than ten - it loses, among others, Schrödinger, who arrived in Wrocław already as an adult professor. If everyone who was ever formally connected with the university as a student, doctoral candidate, lecturer or professor is counted, regardless of the length of their stay, the list grows, and it is precisely this broader definition that lies behind the number ten given by the university itself. Some popular-science compilations add to the group of "Wrocław" laureates people connected with the city only indirectly, which is a source of even larger numbers circulating on the internet. For the sake of order, it is worth sticking to the university's definition and, for each name, keeping in mind exactly what kind of connection it was.

Why this happened right here

The concentration of so many future Nobel laureates around a single university is not a geographical accident, but the effect of the fact that the University of Wrocław, founded in 1811 as a continuation of the earlier Leopoldina Academy of 1702, was for decades one of the more important scientific centres in this part of Europe, with strong departments of physics and chemistry. It was precisely in such an environment - classical gymnasiums, academic families, a chair of theoretical physics with ambitions - that the people who later changed 20th-century physics and chemistry grew up or worked. For today's Wrocław this is a legacy commemorated by plaques and the names of squares, but the university's scientific legacy itself is older and deeper than a single number on a website would suggest.