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The Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen, founded in 1737 by Elector George II of Great Britain (who was simultaneously King of Hanover), has produced or hosted an extraordinary concentration of scientists and thinkers. Gauss developed his work on the normal distribution and non-Euclidean geometry here. Riemann developed Riemannian geometry here. Heisenberg, Max Born, and Robert Oppenheimer all worked here in the 1920s, a decade when the quantum revolution was largely happening on the Gottingen campus. Forty-seven Nobel laureates are associated with the university. The density of intellectual history attached to the streets around the Wilhelmsplatz and Auditorium is unusual even by German university city standards.

The Gänsebrunnen, the little bronze Goose Girl fountain at the Marktplatz, is the most-kissed statue in Germany.

Tradition requires that PhD graduates of the university, upon receiving their degree, rush to the Marktplatz and kiss the girl on the fountain while their friends throw flowers. The ceremony has been going since the nineteenth century and still happens most days in term time. Max Planck kissed the Goose Girl. Otto Hahn kissed the Goose Girl. It's a tradition that humanizes an institution of formidable seriousness.