former institutions combined count 25 Nobel laureates among their past and current students and staff, the fourth largest number of any single university in the United Kingdom (after Oxford, Cambridge and UCL) and the ninth largest of any university in Europe. Furthermore, according to an academic poll two of the top ten discoveries by university academics and researchers were made at the university (namely the first working computer and the contraceptive pill). The Langworthy Professorship, an endowed chair at the university's Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been historically given to a long line of academic luminaries, including Ernest Rutherford (1907–19), Lawrence Bragg (1919–37), Patrick Blackett (1937–53) and more recently Konstantin Novoselov, all of whom have won the Nobel Prize. In 2013, Andre Geim was given the Regius Professorship in Physics, the only one of its kind in the UK.
The university has established joint research funds with leading universities to support a range of research initiatives. For instance, between 2021 and 2023, it partnered with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm University, and Tel Aviv University on research projects in medicine, biology, natural sciences, and engineering.
=== Libraries ===
The University of Manchester Library is the largest non-legal deposit library in the UK and the third-largest academic library after those of Oxford and Cambridge. It has the largest collection of electronic resources of any library in the UK.
The John Rylands Library, founded in memory of John Rylands by his wife Enriqueta Augustina Rylands as an independent institution, is situated in a Victorian Gothic building on Deansgate, in the city centre. It houses an important collection of historic books and other printed materials, manuscripts, including archives and papyri. The papyri are in ancient languages and include the oldest extant New Testament document, Rylands Library Papyrus P52, commonly known as the St John Fragment. In April 2007 the Deansgate site reopened …
