Over the last five centuries, the University has nurtured the talents of seven Nobel laureates (including John Boyd Orr, who has a building named after him), one Prime Minister, as well as Scotland’s inaugural First Minister, Donald Dewer, who is immortalised in statue form outside the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall at the top of Buchannan Street.  Scotland’s first female graduates earned their degrees here in 1894, and the world’s first ultrasound images of a foetus were published by Glasgow Professor Ian Donald in 1958. Edwin Morgan, Poet Laureate and National Poet for Scotland, studied here, as did writers Alastair MacLean, James Alfred White (better known as James Herriot), and the father of documentary filmmaking, John Grierson.

In one of the courtyards is a stone tribute to Jerry Hamer, an archaeologist who worked with the university's Archaeological Research Division.

For fans of the film Being John Malkovich, a creative faculty member has stuck a sign on a small cupboard door, now known as Room 256 in the Kelvin Building, indicating it leads to the office (and possibly mind) of one Dr. John Malkovich.