two further Nobel laureates being subsequently added. Manchester has traditionally been strong in the sciences; it is where the nuclear nature of the atom was discovered by Ernest Rutherford, and the world's first electronic stored-program computer was built at the university. Notable scientists associated with the university include physicists Ernest Rutherford, Osborne Reynolds, Niels Bohr, James Chadwick, Arthur Schuster, Hans Geiger, Ernest Marsden and Balfour Stewart. Contributions in mathematics were made by Paul Erdős, Horace Lamb and Alan Turing. The university has at least as strong a heritage in the humanities and social sciences: major names include William Stanley Jevons and Sir Arthur Lewis in economics; Samuel Alexander, Dorothy Emmet and Alasdair MacIntyre in philosophy, Thomas Tout, Sir Lewis Namier, and A.J.P. Taylor in history; Eugène Vinaver in French, and James Noel Adams in Latin. One of the great polymaths of the twentieth century, Michael Polanyi, was professor of physical chemistry for fifteen years before transferring to a specially created chair of social studies. In addition, the author Anthony Burgess, the Pritzker Prize and RIBA Stirling Prize-winning architect Norman Foster, and the composer Peter Maxwell Davies all attended, or worked at, Manchester.
=== Post-merger (2004 to present) ===
The current University of Manchester was officially launched on 1 October 2004 when Queen Elizabeth II bestowed its royal charter. The university was named the Sunday Times University of the Year in 2006 after winning the inaugural Times Higher Education Supplement award for University of the Year in 2005.
The founding president and vice-chancellor of the new university was Alan Gilbert, former vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, who retired at the end of the 2009–2010 academic year. His successor was Dame Nancy Rothwell, who had held a chair in physiology at the university since 1994. Rothwell served as Vice Chancellor from 2010 to 2024 before handing over to Duncan Ivison. The Nancy …
