Herman Ebbinghaus

1850 - 1909

Hermann Ebbinghaus was born in Bremen, Germany.  He received his education, including a Ph.D. from the University of Bonn.  In 1880 he published his first paper on memory and began his nearly 30 years of teaching and publishing in the field of human memory.  Although the first to apply experimental methods to human memory, he is most well known for his introduction and use of the nonsense syllable.  He died in 1909 of pneumonia in Breslau, Germany.