The Faculty of Science is part of Charles University, the oldest university in Central Europe. Charles University was founded by Charles IV in 1348 and in its then form consisted of four faculties – the Faculty of Liberal Arts, the Faculty of Theology, the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Philosophy. Today Charles University has seventeen faculties, and the Faculty of Science is one of the largest. It was founded as the fifth faculty of the University on 24 June 1920, when the science-oriented institutes were separated from the Faculty of Philosophy at the instigation of its then dean Bohumil Nemec, a distinguished plant physiologist. During its existence, the faculty has produced a number of outstanding personalities. One can name, for example, the chemists Bohuslav Brauner, who, together with Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, promoted the periodic law of the elements, or Jaroslav Heyrovský, winner of the Nobel Prize (1959) for the discovery of polarography. The geological disciplines can be represented by František Slavík, co-founder and one of the first deans of the newly established Faculty of Science, who was a world-renowned mineralogist and petrologist, or the exceptional teacher and palaeontologist Ivo Chlupáč, whose name is now borne by the Faculty’s palaeontological museum. Top experts in many fields are still working at the faculty today. The Faculty of Science of Charles University in Prague consists of four specialist sections – Biology, Chemistry, Geography and Geology – and one institute with an intersectional overlap – the Institute for the Environment. The individual sections bring together departments and research institutes engaged in research and teaching in the respective natural science disciplines.
