The history of Princeton University began in 1746 when New Jersey’s colonial legislature voted to create the College of New Jersey, making it the fourth institution of higher education to be established in the American colonies. The college was located in Elizabethtown, about 10 miles (16 km) from Newark. Its first class consisted of eight students, taught by a single instructor.
The school moved to Newark in 1747, then to Princeton in 1756. The campus relocated several times over the next century as the college expanded. It finally settled on its current location at Nassau and Witherspoon Streets in Princeton in 1896.
The university has been one of the eight Ivy League schools since its inception; it was also one of nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Princeton is one of only three institutions that host two Nobel Prize-winning faculty members: Harold Kroto and Angus Deaton are winners of the 1996 prize for Chemistry and Economics respectively; John Nash won the 1994 prize for Economics while he was a visiting scholar at Fine Hall; Joseph Hirschfeldt won the 2012 Abel Prize for Mathematics while on the faculty at Institute for Advanced Study; and Enrico Fermi won his 1938 Nobel Prize for Physics while working at what is now known as Palmer Laboratory.
In addition to these laureates, 36 Nobel Prizes have been awarded to alumni or former faculty, including 15 physics prizes (more than any other university), 16 chemistry prizes (second only to Harvard), 5 medicine prizes (tied with Johns Hopkins), 3 literature prizes, 2 economics prizes, 1 peace prize, and 1 philosophy prize. One alumnus – John Bardeen – has received two Nobel Prizes: He won a physics prize jointly with Walter Brattain and William Shockley in 1956 for their development of transistor technology; he won another physics prize jointly with Leon N Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer in 1972 “for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity.”