Otto Mencke

Otto Mencke was a German philosopher and scientist, born on 22 March 1644 and dead on 18 January 1707, who spent his career at the University of Leipzig. He took his doctorate there in August 1666 with a thesis on natural theology, the simplicity of God and the commonwealth seen in the microcosm of the human being, and he later held a professorship of moral philosophy. He is most remembered as the founder in 1682 of the Acta Eruditorum, the first scientific journal in Germany, which gave scholars across Europe a regular place to review and announce new work, and he corresponded with Isaac Newton in 1693. His name also survives through the scientific genealogy that runs from him to mathematicians such as Carl Friedrich Gauss and David Hilbert, and the Philosophy Family Tree records hundreds of philosophers in his lineage.