
The University of Manchester is Britain's largest single-site university, with more than 23 Nobel Prize winners among its current and former staff and students. It saw Ernest Rutherford's pioneering research that led to the splitting of the atom and the beginning of computers in 1948 when a machine, built by Tom Kilburn and Sir Freddie Williams, ran its first stored programme. Its aim is to be one of the top 25 universities in the world.