Curated playlist
Members of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities
- Johann Wolfgang von GoetheOn the 13th of October 1806, Napoleon's army poured into Weimar, and the least disciplined of the French soldiers, the so-called spoon guards, broke into the home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They drank his wine, made a great uproar, and…
- Claude Louis BertholletClaude Louis Berthollet spent decades arguing a point that every other leading chemist of his era believed was wrong. He was born on the 9th of December 1748 in Talloires, a small town near Annecy in the Duchy of Savoy, and he would…
- Heinrich Jacob GoldschmidtHeinrich Jacob Goldschmidt was born on the 12th of April 1857 in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and he died on the 20th of September 1937 in Oslo. Between those two dates, he crossed borders repeatedly, building a career…
- Werner HeisenbergWerner Heisenberg was born on the 5th of December 1901 in Würzburg, Germany, the son of a secondary school teacher who would become Germany's only ordinarius professor of medieval and modern Greek studies. That background in language and…
- Carl Friedrich GaussJohann Carl Friedrich Gauss was nineteen years old when he solved a problem the Ancient Greeks had left open for more than two thousand years. He proved that a regular seventeen-sided polygon, the heptadecagon, could be drawn with nothing…
- Jacob GrimmJacob Ludwig Karl Grimm was born on the 4th of January 1785, in Hanau in Hesse-Kassel, and he spent nearly eight decades building what may be the most wide-ranging scholarly legacy in the history of the German language. His father Philipp,…
- Alexander von HumboldtAlexander von Humboldt stood at the top of the volcano Chimborazo in Ecuador in 1802 at 19,286 feet above sea level, higher than any Westerner had ever climbed. He was gasping for air, bleeding from his gums, and still taking measurements.…
- Max BornMax Born shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for work he had completed nearly three decades earlier. The delay was not an oversight. It was a slow reckoning with just how much he had changed the way science thought about reality. Born…
- Svante ArrheniusSvante Arrhenius taught himself to read at age three, not because anyone encouraged him, but because he decided to. By watching his father add numbers in account books, he became an arithmetical prodigy before most children can tie their…
- Niels BohrNiels Bohr once described the tension at the heart of all good teaching as the struggle between "Klarheit und Wahrheit" - clarity and truth. It was a conflict he never entirely resolved, and it drove him to build an entirely new picture of…
- Jacob BurckhardtJacob Burckhardt once turned down the most prestigious history chair in Germany, the very seat held by his own teacher, Leopold von Ranke, at the University of Berlin, and went back to Basel instead. That choice, made in 1872, says almost…
- Peter Andreas MunchPeter Andreas Munch was born in Christiania on the 15th of December 1810, and by the time he died in Rome on the 25th of May 1863, he had reshaped how Norway understood its own past. He trained as a lawyer, then abandoned that path…