The University of Chicago is a private university located principally in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. Incorporated in 1890 by the American Baptist Education Society, the school has traditionally dated its founding to July 1, 1891, when William Rainey Harper became President and first member of the faculty; the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller is officially designated "Founder." The University of Chicago held its first classes on October 1, 1892. Chicago was one of the first universities in the country to be conceived as a combination of the American interdisciplinary liberal arts college and the German research university.

Affiliated with 81 Nobel Prize laureates, the University of Chicago is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost universities. Historically, the university is noted for the unique undergraduate core curriculum pioneered by Robert Hutchins in the 1930s, and for influential academic movements such as the Chicago School of Economics, the Chicago School of Sociology, and the Law and Economics movement in legal analysis. The University of Chicago was the site of the world's first man-made self-sustaining nuclear reaction. It is also home to the Committee on Social Thought, an interdisciplinary graduate research program, and to the largest university press in the United States.