Ernest Solvay was twenty-three when he worked out a way to make sodium carbonate - soda ash, used in glass, soap, and paper - by passing carbon dioxide and ammonia through brine. The Solvay process undercut every competing method in the world within a generation, and the company he founded in 1863 with his brother Alfred made the family one of the wealthiest in Europe. Solvay had only a basic education himself; ill health had kept him out of university. He spent his fortune trying to give other people the formal training he had never received. In 1894 he founded the Institute of Sociology at the Universite libre de Bruxelles. In 1903 he donated the funds for the Ecole de Commerce Solvay - Brussels's first dedicated business school. In 1911 he held the first Solvay Conference on Physics. The pattern was consistent: rigorous, secular, scientific, and aimed at producing people who could think.

ULB's Department of Economics had opened in 1899; Solvay's business school opened four years later. For most of the twentieth century they ran in parallel, occasionally collaborating, occasionally competing. In 2008 the university finally merged them into a single faculty - the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management - and in 2010 dropped a new purpose-built home onto the Solbosch campus, on the corner of Avenue Franklin Roosevelt and Avenue Jeanne, a short walk from the Bois de la Cambre. Today the school enrols more than 5,000 students across roughly thirty programmes and is the only business school in Belgium to require its undergraduates to spend a full six months abroad. The partner network runs to seventy universities in thirty-two countries: Berkeley, Carleton, Tecnologico de Monterrey, IIM Ahmedabad, McGill, Peking University HSBC Business School. Belgian students leave with an English fluency that their parents did not have.

Solvay is unusual among European business schools in that its faculty are research scientists first. The three main centres - the Centre Emile Bernheim, DULBEA, and ECARES - publish more than 240 papers in peer-reviewed journals every five years and supervise hundreds of PhD candidates. ECARES, founded in 1991, started as a joint venture with the Centre for Economic Policy Research network in London and remains one of the leading econometrics groups in continental Europe. DULBEA, going back to the 1950s, was the brainchild of Etienne Sadi Kirschen, who wanted Belgian economic policy to be built on empirical evidence rather than political instinct. The CERMi research centre, run jointly with the Universite de Mons, has spent two decades documenting microfinance in developing countries. None of it is the obvious face of a business school. It is, however, the architecture Solvay himself would have insisted on.

The list of people Solvay Business School has produced does not always advertise the school's name, but it is long and improbable. Camille Gutt, who graduated before the First World War, became Belgium's finance minister and then, in 1946, the first Managing Director of the new International Monetary Fund - a job that required negotiating with John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White in a room thick with cigar smoke. Roberto Lavagna, an Argentine economist, became his country's Minister of Economy during the worst of the early-2000s crisis. Paul Deneve, who graduated from the school, went on to run Yves Saint Laurent and then become a vice-president at Apple. Pierre Lagrange co-founded GLG Partners, one of the largest hedge funds in Europe. Hubert Ansiaux and Maurice Frere both served as Governor of the National Bank of Belgium. The school's alumni network now spans more than 35,000 members in over sixty-five countries - large for an institution that has spent most of its history with fewer than a thousand students enrolled at a time.

The Solbosch campus, where Solvay sits today, was built after the First World War with funding from the Belgian American Educational Foundation, after the Free University moved out of the Granvelle Palace in central Brussels. The location was deliberate - close enough to the city to draw on its talent, far enough out to give the university room to grow. The Bois de la Cambre, the long oblong of urban forest just south, is where Brussels comes to run, picnic, and pretend it lives somewhere greener than it does. ULB's main buildings cluster on the eastern flank of the campus; Solvay's 2010 building occupies the corner. Inside it, students attend lectures on financial markets and biotech ventures in a building named for a man whose original fortune came from boiling brine. Ernest Solvay died in 1922. His company, his physics conferences, and his school all survived him; the school just took the longest to grow into its name.