The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Ukraine, established in 1918, is the oldest and largest of the republican academies that existed within the former USSR. In the year of its organization, the Academy consisted of three scholarly departments - history and philology, physics and mathematics, social and economic studies, which, in turn, encompassed 3 institutes and 15 commissions. 140 scholars worked in them. Today NAS of Ukraine has 13 departments, about 170 institutes and other research institutions, employing 13,000 researchers. Its current membership is 545.