Kyoto University (京都大学, Kyōto daigaku), or Kyodai (京大, Kyōdai) is a national university located in Kyoto, Japan. It is the second oldest Japanese university, one of the highest ranked universities in Asia and one of Japan's National Seven Universities. One of Asia’s leading research-oriented institutions, Kyoto University is famed for producing world-class researchers, including eight Nobel Prize laureates, two Fields medalists and one Gauss Prize. The university has been consistently ranked the second best institute in Japan since 2008 in various independent university ranking schemes.

The forerunner of the Kyoto University was the Chemistry School (舎密局, Seimi-kyoku) founded in Osaka in 1869, which, despite its name, taught physics as well. (舎密 is a transcription of a Dutch word chemie.) Later, the Third Higher School (第三髙等學校, Daisan-kōtō-gakkō) was established in the place of Seimi-kyoku in 1886, it then transferred to the university's present main campus in the same year.

Kyoto Imperial University (京都帝國大學, Kyōto-teikoku-daigaku) as a part of the Imperial University system was established on June 18, 1897, using the Third Higher School's buildings. The higher school moved to a patch of land just across the street, where the Yoshida South Campus stands today. In the same year of the university's establishment, the College of Science and Technology was founded. The College of Law and the College of Medicine were founded in 1899, the College of Letters in 1906, expanding the university's activities to areas outside natural science.

After World War II, the current Kyoto University was established by merging the imperial university and the Third Higher School, which assumed the duty of teaching liberal arts as the Faculty of Liberal Arts (教養部, Kyōyō-bu). The faculty was dissolved with the foundation of the Faculty of Integrated Human Studies (総合人間学部, Sōgō-ningen-gakubu) in 1992.

Kyoto University has since 2004 been incorporated as a national university corporation under a new law which applies to all national universities.

Despite the incorporation which has led to increased financial independence and autonomy, Kyoto University is still partly controlled by the Japanese Ministry of Education (文部科学省 ,Monbu-kagaku-shō).

The University's Department of Geophysics and their Disaster Prevention Research Institute are both represented on the national Coordinating Committee for Earthquake Prediction.

The Clocktower