Science and technology in Germany has a long history, and research and development efforts form an integral part of the country's economy. Germany has been the home of some of the most prominent researchers in various scientific disciplines, notably physics, mathematics, chemistry and engineering. Before World War II, Germany had produced more Nobel laureates in scientific fields than any other nation, and was the preeminent country in the natural sciences.National Science Nobel Prize shares 1901–2009 by citizenship at the time of the award and by country of birth. From J. Schmidhuber (2010), Evolution of National Nobel Prize Shares in the 20th Century at arXiv:1009.2634v1Swedish academy awards. ScienceNews web edition, Friday, 1 October 2010: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/63944/title/Swedish_academy_awards Germany is currently the nation with the 3rd most Nobel Prize winners, 115.
The German language was, along with English and French, one of the leading languages of science from the late 19th century until the end of World War II. After the war, because so many scientific researchers' and teachers' careers had been ended either by Nazi Germany which started a brain drain, the denazification process, the American Operation Paperclip and Soviet Operation Osoaviakhim which exacerbated the brain drain in post-war Germany, or simply losing the war, "Germany, German science, and German as the language of science had all lost their leading position in the scientific community."
Today, scientific research in the country is supported by industry, the network of German universities and scientific state-institutions such as the Max Planck Society and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The raw output of scientific research from Germany consistently ranks among the world's highest.Top 20 Country Rankings in All Fields, 2006, Thomson Corporation, retrieved 4 January 2007. Germany was declared the most innovative country in the world in the 2020 Bloomberg Innovation Index and was ranked 11th in the Global Innovation Index in 2025 and 2026
Institutions
The Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities (abbreviated Academies Union) is an association of the eight largest academies of sciences in Germany.Akademienunion, retrieved 8 November 2025
The of Masterpieces of Science and Technology in Munich is one of the largest science and technology museums in the world in terms of exhibition space, with about 28,000 exhibited objects from 50 fields of science and technology.Website Deutsches Museum
The (BMFTR) is a supreme authority of the Federal Republic of Germany for science and technology. The headquarter of the Federal Ministry is located in Bonn, the second office in Berlin. It was founded in 1972 as Federal Ministry of Research and Technology (BMFT) to promote basic research, applied research and technological development.BMBF: Federal Ministry of Education and Research , access-date: 20. Juni 2024
Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action ( (BMWK, previous BMWi)
Foundations Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research association) German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), promoting international exchange of scientists and students) The supports young scientists and research projects. It was founded in 1959 and is located in Cologne. The purpose of the foundation, with an endowment capital of €542.4 million, is to promote science at scientific universities and research institutes, primarily in Germany, under particular consideration on young scientists.Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. Retrieved 19 June 2024
National science libraries
German National Library of Economics (ZWB), Kiel & Hamburg German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED), Cologne & Bonn German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB), Hanover
Research organizations
Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (complex systems und large-scale research), Bonn & Berlin Fraunhofer Society (applied research and mission oriented research, Munich) Leibniz Association (fundamental and applied research), Berlin Max Planck Society (fundamental research), Munich Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik ("Society of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics"), Dresden The Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), officially: Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering gGmbH, is a privately financed IT institute and, together with the University of Potsdam, forms the Digital Engineering Faculty. It is located in Potsdam-Babelsberg and researches practical and applied topics in digital technologies. Its founder and namesake is SAP founder Hasso Plattner.
Prize committees The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize is granted to ten scientists and academics every year. With a maximum of €2.5 million per award it is one of highest endowed research prizes in the world. The prize and the mentioned organization above is named after the German polymath and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who was a contemporary and competitor of Isaac Newton (1642–1727). The Bunsen–Kirchhoff Award is a prize for "outstanding achievements" in the field of analytical spectroscopy. The prize is named in honor of chemist Robert Bunsen and physicist Gustav Kirchhoff (→ Physics). The Helmholtz Prize is awarded with €20,000 every two to three years to European scientists for scientific and technological research in metrology.Association of German Research Centres: Doctoral Award – Helmholtz – Association of German Research Centres, access-date: 11. Juni 2024
Scientific fields
The global spread of the printing press with movable types and an oil-based ink was a process that began around 1440 with the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg () in the Free City of Mainz and continued until the introduction of printing based on this procedure in all parts of the world in the 19th century, thus creating the conditions for the dissemination of generally accessible scientific publications emerging to the revolution of science.
Scientific Revolution
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was one of the originators of the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries as an astronomer, physicist, mathematician and natural philosopher. He advocated the idea of a heliocentric model of the Solar System, which can be traced back to the theories of the ancient Greek astronomers Aristarchus of Samos and Seleucus of Seleucia, as well as to the 16th-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), whose main work about the heliocentric model was first published by Johannes Petreius (–1550) and likely the polymath Johannes Schöner (1477–1547) in the Free Imperial City of Nuremberg in 1543. In March 1600, Kepler became assistant to the astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) at the court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, Kingdom of Bohemia. After Brahe's death in October of the next year, Kepler succeeded him as imperial mathematician and court astronomer (until 1627).
Johannes Kepler discovered the laws according to which planets are moving around the Sun, who were called Kepler's laws after him. With his introduction to calculating with logarithms, Kepler contributed to the spread of this type of calculation. In mathematics, a numerical method for calculating the volume of wine barrels with integrals was named former Kepler's barrel rule. He made optics to a subject of scientific investigation and confirmed the discoveries made with the telescope by his Italian contemporary Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). He worked on the theory of the telescope and invented the refracting astronomical or Keplerian telescope,Molecular Expressions: Science, Optics and You – Timeline – Johannes Kepler which involved a considerable improvement over the Galilean telescope. Kepler also made the invention of the valveless gear pump, because a mine owner needed a device to pump water out of his mine.
Physics
Otto von Guericke (1602–1686) was a scientist, inventor, mathematician and physicist from Magdeburg. He is best known for his experiments on air pressure using the Magdeburg hemispheres. With the invention of the vacuum pump he laid the foundation of vacuum technology.
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736) was a physicist and inventor of measuring instruments from Danzig. The temperature unit degrees Fahrenheit (°F) was named after him.
Gustav Kirchhoff (1824–1887) was a physicist from Königsberg who made a particular contribution to the study of electricity. Today, Kirchhoff is best known for Kirchhoff's circuit laws, and for introducing the concept of a black body, which contributed to the emergence of quantum mechanics. However, Kirchhoff's circuit laws were discovered as early as 1833 by Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) during his experiments on electricity. With Robert Bunsen (1811–1899) he developed flame spectroscopy in 1859, which can be used to detect chemical elements with high specificity. Bunsen was a chemist from Göttingen, and together with Kirchhoff discovered the elements caesium and rubidium in 1861. He perfected the Bunsen burner, which is named after him, and invented the Bunsen cell and a grease-spot photometer.
The work of Albert Einstein (1879–1955), best known for developing the theory of relativity, and Max Planck (1858–1947), he is known for the Planck constant, was crucial to the foundation of modern physics, which Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) and Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) developed further.Roberts, J. M. The New Penguin History of the World, Penguin History, 2002. Pg. 1014. They were preceded by such key physicists as Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826), who discovered the Fraunhofer lines in spectroscopy, and Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), among others. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845–1923) discovered X-rays in 1895, an accomplishment that made him the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 and eventually earned him an element name, roentgenium. Heinrich Rudolf Hertz's (1857–1894) work in the domain of electromagnetic radiation were pivotal to the development of modern telecommunication; the unit of frequency was named in his honor "Hertz". Mathematical aerodynamics was developed in Germany, especially by Ludwig Prandtl.
Karl Schwarzschild (1873–1916) was an astrophysicist from Frankfurt am Main. He was professor and director of the Göttingen Observatory from 1901 to 1909. There he was able to work together with scientists like David Hilbert (1862–1943) and Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909). Schwarzschild works on relativity provided the first exact solutions to the field equations of Albert Einstein's general relativity – one for an uncharged, non-rotating spherically symmetric body and one for a static isotropic void around a solid body. Schwarzschild did some fundamental works on classical black holes. This is why some properties of black holes got their name, namely the Schwarzschild metric and the Schwarzschild radius. The center of a non-rotating, uncharged black hole is called the Schwarzschild singularity.