Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850 - 1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered experimental study of memory, and discovered the forgetting curve.
Ebbinghaus was born in Barmen, Germany. At 17 he entered the University of Bonn. His first and foremost interest was psychology. His studies were interrupted in 1870 due to the Franco-Prussian War. He enlisted in the Prussian army. He resumed his studies and received a Ph.D. in 1873.
In 1885, he published his ground-breaking On Memory in which he described experiments he conducted on himself to describe the process of forgetting.
He was professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin, and later in Breslau (now Polish Wroclaw). He died of pneumonia in Breslau at the age of 59.
His contributions are multiple. His famous work on memory initiated experimental psychology. He pioneered precise experimental techniques used in the research on learning. In addition to his research and lecturing, he established two psychology laboratories in Germany, and founded a major psychology journal.
Discussion
Ebbinghaus's statistical approach is related to that of Fechner in
- Stephen M Stigler The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1986. ch. 7: Psychophysics as Counterpoint.
External links
Ebbinghaus's Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology is available on the Classics in the History of Psychology website.
and an introduction by Robert H. Wozniak
There is an Ebbinghaus entry on the Human Intelligence website
There is a photograph of Ebbinghaus at
