ETH Zurich, formally the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, was created by an act of the Swiss federal parliament in 1854 and admitted its first cohort the following year, holding its opening lectures on 16 October 1855. It began life as the Eidgenössische polytechnische Schule, a federal polytechnic intended to supply engineers, architects and scientists to a country that had industrialised without a national technical school of its own. The polytechnic was renamed in 1911. Together with EPFL in Lausanne it forms the pair of federal institutes of technology within the ETH Domain, a federally funded consortium of universities and national research institutes.

Academic work is organised into sixteen departments covering engineering, architecture, the natural sciences, mathematics, and the management and social sciences. The school established its reputation early in chemistry, mathematics and physics, and those fields remain central to its research profile alongside computer science, robotics, and the earth and environmental sciences. Twenty-two Nobel laureates have been associated with the institution as students, teachers or researchers. Albert Einstein, who studied and later taught there, is the best known; the mathematician John von Neumann and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli are also part of its history.

The university works from two main sites in Zurich. The Zentrum campus is spread across buildings in the city centre next to the University of Zurich and houses nine of the sixteen departments; the Hönggerberg site, built on higher ground to the north-west, is a more conventional self-contained campus of laboratories, teaching buildings and student residences, and holds six departments. Enrolment stood at 26,942 in 2025, including roughly 11,500 undergraduates, 10,100 master's students and 4,300 doctoral candidates. Bachelor's teaching is conducted largely in German, while master's and doctoral programmes are generally delivered in English. Tuition is set by federal regulation, and a higher semester fee for foreign students took effect in autumn 2025.