Decent fun – Dance with an attitude

During the ball season, the City of Vienna invites guests to City Hall for a Ball of the Sciences, featuring the entire Viennese research and higher education community. The theme: “Waltz and Science.”

The Science Ball showcases the excellence and diversity of Vienna’s research landscape. The traditional elements of a Viennese ball are combined with references to Vienna’s universities. International visibility is ensured by global stars of popular science communication.

Viennese science is large and diverse: 215,000 students and researchers (= 12.5% of the population) at 23 universities, private universities, and universities of applied sciences, plus the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), AIT, ISTA, WPI, FWF, IIASA, LBG, IWM, FFG, ARC, and the Austrian National Union of Students (ÖH), as well as research museums such as the Natural History Museum (NHM) and the Technology Museum (TMW).

Vienna’s academic community excels in research and teaching: world-leading in quantum physics, computer science, molecular biology, logic, history, etc.; 80% of ERC grant recipients active in Austria conduct research in the Greater Vienna area (455 out of 563 researchers, as of September 2025).

Vienna’s academic community is international: People from more than 100 nations research, teach, and study in the largest university location in the German-speaking world. 27% of students come from abroad.

The official ball organizer is the Wolfgang Pauli Institute (WPI). The ball is planned and organized by Minerva SciCom GmbH, which emerged from the association “Wien Wissen” (Association for the Promotion of Science Communication)