Hermann von Helmholtz

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821 to 1894) was a German physicist and physician whose work on the physiology of the senses shaped the study of perception. Born in Potsdam, he earned a medical doctorate in 1842 and held posts in anatomy and physiology at Königsberg, Bonn and Heidelberg before becoming professor of physics in Berlin in 1871. In physiology and psychology he is known for his mathematics concerning the eye, theories of vision, ideas on the visual perception of space, colour vision research, the sensation of tone and the perception of sound, and for an empiricism in the physiology of perception. In 1851 he invented the ophthalmoscope. In physics he gave the first maximally general formulation of the conservation of energy. His broadly Kantian approach to perceptual space also fed into neo-Kantian philosophy, and the Helmholtz Association of German research institutions bears his name.