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Historical reputation and impact

The University of Göttingen is a traditional institution with a significant historical standing. This is substantiated by a scientific study on the historical development of world university rankings starting in 2013, which examined a web dataset from 24 Wikipedia language versions, covering 59% of the world's population and accounting for 68% of all Wikipedia articles across 287 languages. This comprehensive analysis identified the most influential universities globally over the past ten centuries, resulting in the "2017 Wikipedia World University Rankings", where the University of Göttingen ranked the 20th in terms of "web page rank" (search engine data), the 8th on account of "chei rank" (interactive citation data), and the 6th in the world on "2D rank" combining both categories of data.

As of 2002, the University of Göttingen was associated with 44 Nobel laureates according to an official count released by the University of Göttingen in that year. By this number alone, the University of Göttingen ranked among the global top 15 universities. Recent Nobel laureates associated with the university are Klaus Hasselmann (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2021), Stefan Hell (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2014), Thomas C. Südhof (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2013), and Thomas Arthur Steitz (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2009). Klaus Hasselmann received his PhD in physics from the University of Göttingen in 1957. Stefan Hell has been a lecturer (in Privatdozent capacity) at the University of Göttingen since 2004 and the director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in the Göttingen Campus since 2002. Thomas Südhof, currently a professor at Stanford University, worked on his doctoral thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in the lab of British biochemist Victor P. Whittaker and received his PhD in medical science from the University of Göttingen in 1982. Thomas Arthur Steitz was a Macy Fellow at the University of Göttingen during 1976–1977.

Today, a number of judges in national and international courts of the highest level are still affiliated with the Faculty of Law. As of 2021, four out of sixteen in-office Justices of the Federal Constitutional Court (German: Bundesverfassungsgericht; abbreviated: BVerfG), Germany's supreme constitutional court, are affiliated with the University of Göttingen: two of them (Andreas Paulus & Christine Langenfeld) are, currently, professors at the Faculty of Law of the University of Göttingen, while two others (Ines Härtel & Henning Radtke) obtained their PhD in law (Dr.iur) from the University of Göttingen. Also in 2021, Georg Nolte, a former professor of public international law at the University of Göttingen, took office as Judge of the International Court of Justice on behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany. Hsu Tzong-li, a Taiwanese judge who has served as the President of the Judicial Yuan (Taiwan's constitutional court) since 2016, earned his doctorate in law from University of Göttingen in 1986.