Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1742–1799 5 entries
Biography
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, mathematician and satirist, and the first great writer of aphorisms in the German language. The youngest of seventeen children of a pastor, he was born near Darmstadt, and a curvature of the spine left him small and hunchbacked. He studied at the University of Göttingen and taught there as one of the first professors of experimental physics in Germany. His lectures, full of experiments, drew students from far and wide, and Alessandro Volta was among his visitors.
In physics he is remembered for the branching patterns of electric discharge that are still called Lichtenberg figures. He also wrote witty essays and satires, and commentaries on the engravings of William Hogarth. His notebooks, which he called his waste books, were published after his death, and their sharp, playful observations were admired by Goethe, Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Einstein. He died in Göttingen in 1799.
- Aphorisms 5