Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German scientist, satirist and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. Today, he is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modeled on the English bookkeeping term "waste books", and for his discovery of the strange treelike patterns now called Lichtenberg figures. Lichtenberg was the youngest of seventeen children of pastor Johann Conrad Lichtenberg. His father, ascending through the ranks of the church hierarchy, eventually became superintendent for Darmstadt. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was educated at his parents' house until ten years of age, when he joined the Lateinschule in Darmstadt.
