Paderborn University (German: Universität Paderborn) is one of the fourteen public research universities in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. It was founded in 1972 and 20,308 students were enrolled at the university in the wintersemester 2016/2017. It offers 62 different degree programmes. The university has several winners of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize awarded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and ERC grant recipients of the European Research Council. In 2002, the Romanian mathematician Preda Mihăilescu proved the Catalan conjecture, a number-theoretical conjecture, formulated by the French and Belgian mathematician Eugène Charles Catalan, which had stood unresolved for 158 years. The University Closely Collaborates with the Heinz Nixdorf Institute, Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing and two Fraunhofer Institutes for research in Computer Science, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering and Quantum Photonics. In 2018, world record for "optical data transmission at 128 gigabits per second" was achieved at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute of the University of Paderborn. The academic ranking of world universities 2018, popularly known as "shanghai rankings" placed the university in the ranking bracket 50–75 among mathematics departments worldwide. Source: Wikipedia (en)