The University of Chicago (referred to as Chicago, UChicago or the U of C) is a private university located principally in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. It credits its establishment to the oil magnate and benefactor John D. Rockefeller, traditionally dating its founding to July 1, 1891 when William Rainey Harper became the university's president.

Affiliated with 82 Nobel Prize laureates, the University of Chicago is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost universities. Known for its rigorous devotion to academic scholarship and intellectual life, it was one of the first universities in the United States to be conceived as a combination of an American liberal arts college and a German research university. The university's undergraduate college consistently ranks among the country's top ten national universities in the annual rankings published by U.S. News & World Report and is currently ranked number eight (tied with Columbia University and Duke University).

Historically, the university has also been noted for its unique undergraduate core curriculum pioneered by Robert Hutchins; for several influential academic movements and centers, such as the Chicago School of Economics, the Chicago School of Sociology, the Law and Economics movement in legal analysis, the Committee on Social Thought, and several of the most prominent movements in anthropology; and its role in developing modern physics leading to the world's first man-made, self-sustaining nuclear reaction.

Hyde Park campus

The University of Chicago is principally located in the neighborhoods of Hyde Park and Woodlawn, seven miles (11 km) south of downtown Chicago. The campus is bisected by the Midway Plaisance, a large linear park created for the 1893 World's Fair. While the bulk of the campus is located north of the Midway, some of the professional schools (including the Law School) are located south of the Midway. The quadrangles of the main campus feature a botanical garden and neo-Gothic buildings constructed mostly out of limestone in the late 19th century. The tallest building is Bertram Goodhue's Rockefeller Chapel. Buildings of the original quadrangles were deliberately patterned after the layouts of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Mitchell Tower, for example, is a reproduction of Oxford's Magdalen Tower, and the University Commons, Hutchinson Hall, is a duplicate of Oxford's Christ Church Hall.

Contemporary buildings have attempted to complement the style of the original architecture. Notable examples include the Laird Bell Law Quadrangle by Eero Saarinen, the School of Social Service Administration by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the Robie House by Frank Lloyd Wright. The largest modern addition is the Regenstein Library, designed by architect Walter Netsch and constructed on the grounds of the former Stagg Field, the site of the world's first nuclear reaction.