The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology is one of Germany's elite research universities, founded in 1825 and consistently ranked among the top three technical universities in the country alongside Munich's TU and Berlin's TU. The campus spreads across the city centre in a mixture of 19th-century lecture halls and modernist research facilities.
The KIT is worth including in a walk through central Karlsruhe — several of the older campus buildings along Kaiserstraße and Englerstraße are architecturally notable, and the university gives the city much of its cosmopolitan, intellectual character. The institute has produced several Nobel Prize laureates, including Heinrich Hertz, who worked here when he demonstrated the existence of electromagnetic waves in 1886 — a discovery with some consequences for world history.