The University of Barcelona (UB) was founded in 1450. The present central buiding was inaugurated in 1871. Today the university has four campuses, in different parts of the city. The UB is the oldest and largest of the six universities in Barcelona, and of the ten in Catalonia. It has 76.000 students — more than half of the total student population of Catalonia — and is the second largest in terms of students number in Spain.

UB students have access to an extensive range of services. Ten thousand bachelor's degrees and 450 PhDs are awarded each year.

The university is staffed by 4,152 faculty members and 1,828 other personnel. It manages around 2,073 million pesetas in research and technology related activities.

The UB is structured in five divisions made up of related areas of teaching, twenty university schools, 97 departments and 78 degree courses. Postgraduate and graduate school programs are also offered, as well as a large number of continuing educations courses.

The UB library is the second largest in Spain in number of books, after the National Library in Madrid. More than two million books and about 36,000 journals are available in 17 sections in the schools and campuses, and about 6,000 reading sites.

The university is particularly interested in fostering international relations, and for many years has been the leader among European universities in numbers of student exchanges organized as part of the Erasmus program.

Since 1995, the UB has implemented a quality program aiming fundamentally to design mid and long term strategies in order to evaluate and improve teaching and research in public higher education.

• Institute of Cosmos Sciences, University of Barcelona
• University of Barcelona, Department of Applied Mathematics and Analysis