Zurich in the context of "ETH Zurich"

Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located at the intersection of Central, Western, and Southern Europe. It is bordered by Germany to the north, France to the west, Austria and Liechtenstein to the east, and Italy to the south. Switzerland is geographically divided among the Swiss Alps, the Swiss Plateau, and the Jura mountains; the Alps cover most of the country's territory, whereas the majority of its 9 million people are concentrated on the plateau, which hosts many of the largest cities and economic centres, including Zurich, Geneva, Basel, Bern, Lausanne, Winterthur, and Lucerne.

Switzerland is a federal republic composed of 26 cantons, with Bern serving as the federal city and the seat of the national government. The country encompasses four principal linguistic and cultural regions—German, French, Italian, and Romansh—reflecting a long-standing tradition of multilingualism and cultural pluralism. Swiss national identity nonetheless remains fairly cohesive, rooted in a shared historical background, common values such as federalism and direct democracy, and Alpine symbolism. Swiss nationhood transcends language, ethnicity, and religion, leading to Switzerland being described as a Willensnation ("nation of volition") rather than a conventional nation state.

Lausanne (/loʊˈzæn/ loh-ZAN, US also /loʊˈzɑːn/ loh-ZAHN; French: [lozan] ; Arpitan: Losena [lɔˈzəna] ) is the capital and largest city of the Swiss French-speaking canton of Vaud, in Switzerland. The Olympic capital, it is a hilly city situated on the shores of Lake Geneva, about halfway between the Jura Mountains and the Alps, and facing the French town of Évian-les-Bains across the lake. Lausanne is located (as the crow flies) 51.7 kilometres (32 miles) northeast of Geneva, the nearest major city. The Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland convenes in Lausanne, although it is not the de jure capital of the nation.

The municipality of Lausanne has a population of about 150,000, making it the fourth largest city in Switzerland after Basel, Geneva, and Zurich, with the entire agglomeration area having about 420,000 inhabitants (as of January 2019). The metropolitan area of Lausanne-Geneva (including Vevey-Montreux, Yverdon-les-Bains, Valais and foreign parts), commonly designated as Arc lémanique was over 1.3 million inhabitants in 2017 and is the fastest growing in Switzerland.

The Old Swiss Confederacy, also known as Switzerland or the Swiss Confederacy, was a loose confederation of independent small states (French: cantons, German: Orte or Stände), initially within the Holy Roman Empire. It is the precursor of the modern state of Switzerland.

It formed at the end of the 13th century, from a nucleus in what is now Central Switzerland, expanding to include the cities of Zurich and Bern by the middle of the 14th century. This formed a rare union of rural and urban communes, all of which enjoyed imperial immediacy in the Holy Roman Empire.

Basel (/ˈbɑːzəl/ BAH-zəl; Swiss Standard German: [ˈbaːzl̩] ), also known as Basle (/bɑːl/ BAHL), is a city in northwestern Switzerland on the river Rhine (at the transition from the High to the Upper Rhine). Basel is Switzerland's third-most-populous city (after Zurich and Geneva), with 177,595 inhabitants within the city municipality limits.

Basel is commonly considered to be the cultural capital of Switzerland and the city is famous for its many museums, including the Kunstmuseum, which is the first collection of art accessible to the public in the world (1661) and the largest museum of art in Switzerland, the Fondation Beyeler (located in Riehen), the Museum Tinguely and the Museum of Contemporary Art, which is the first public museum of contemporary art in Europe. Forty museums are spread throughout the city-canton, making Basel one of the largest cultural centres in relation to its size and population in Europe. It is the hometown of Art Basel, the world's most prestigious and influential international art fair, showcasing modern and contemporary works from leading galleries and attracting top collectors, artists, and enthusiasts globally.

Winterthur (Swiss Standard German pronunciation: [ˈvɪntərtuːr]; French: Winterthour [vintəʁtuʁ, vintɛʁ-]) is a city in the canton of Zurich in northern Switzerland. With over 120,000 residents, it is the country's sixth-largest city by population, as well as its ninth-largest agglomeration with about 140,000 inhabitants. Located about 20 kilometres (12 mi) northeast of Zurich, Winterthur is a service and high-tech industrial satellite city within Zurich Metropolitan Area.

The official language of Winterthur is German, but the main spoken language is the local variant of the Alemannic Swiss German dialect, Zurich German. Winterthur is usually abbreviated as Winti in the local dialect and by its inhabitants.

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum theory. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc, which arises from special relativity, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for "his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".

Born in the German Empire, Einstein moved to Switzerland in 1895, forsaking his German citizenship (as a subject of the Kingdom of Württemberg) the following year. In 1897, at the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Swiss federal polytechnic school in Zurich, graduating in 1900. He acquired Swiss citizenship a year later, which he kept for the rest of his life, and afterwards secured a permanent position at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. In 1905, he submitted a successful PhD dissertation to the University of Zurich. In 1914, he moved to Berlin to join the Prussian Academy of Sciences and the Humboldt University of Berlin, becoming director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in 1917; he also became a German citizen again, this time as a subject of the Kingdom of Prussia. In 1933, while Einstein was visiting the United States, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Horrified by the Nazi persecution of his fellow Jews, he decided to remain in the US, and was granted American citizenship in 1940. On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential German nuclear weapons program and recommending that the US begin similar research, later carried out as the Manhattan Project.

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (born James Augusta Joyce; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist movement and is regarded among the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914) and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.

Born in Dublin into a middle-class family, Joyce attended the Jesuit Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, then, briefly, the Christian Brothers–run O'Connell School. Despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father's unpredictable finances, he excelled at the Jesuit Belvedere College and graduated from University College Dublin in 1902. In 1904, he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, and they moved to mainland Europe. He briefly worked in Pola (now in Croatia) and then moved to Trieste in Austria-Hungary, working as an English instructor. Except for an eight-month stay in Rome working as a correspondence clerk and three visits to Dublin, Joyce lived there until 1915. In Trieste, he published his book of poems Chamber Music and his short-story collection Dubliners, and began serially publishing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the English magazine The Egoist. During most of World War I, Joyce lived in Zurich, Switzerland, and worked on Ulysses. After the war, he briefly returned to Trieste and in 1920 moved to Paris, which was his primary residence until 1940.

The Fraumünster (German pronunciation: [fʁaʊ̯ˈmʏnstɐ]; lit. in English: Women's Minster) is a church in Zurich, Switzerland, which was built on the remains of a former abbey for aristocratic women and which was founded in 853 by Louis the German for his daughter Hildegard. He endowed the Benedictine convent with the lands of Zurich, Uri, and the Albis forest, and granted the convent immunity, placing it under his direct authority. Today, it belongs to the Evangelical Reformed Church of the canton of Zurich and is one of the four main churches of Zürich, the others being the Grossmünster, Prediger and St. Peter's churches.