Founding of Uppsala University

Uppsala University is the oldest university in Sweden and in the Nordic countries. It was founded by Archbishop Jakob Ulvsson with the authorization of Pope Sixtus IV, as a center for training clergy and officials in the Swedish church province. It declined in the 16th century during the Reformation and the political turmoil of the time, and it was revived in the early 17th century under King Gustavus Adolphus, who endowed it with royal estates. Its scholars have included Carl Linnaeus, who laid the foundations of modern biological classification, the astronomer Anders Celsius, who devised a temperature scale, and the physicist Anders Ångström. Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, was an alumnus, and the university has produced several Nobel laureates.

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