Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
German scientist and satirist
- Lived
- 1742–1799
- Country
- Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt
Updated September 2026
About Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile. He was the first person in Germany to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics. He is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "waste books" or "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of the tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures.
Biography from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Sources: book lists and dates from Wikidata and Open Library, ratings from Open Library readers. Last updated September 2026.