Abraham Gotthelf Kästner

Abraham Gotthelf Kästner (27 September 1719 to 20 June 1800) was a German mathematician and epigrammatist who became known more for textbooks and encyclopedic compilations than for original research. The son of a law professor, he studied law, philosophy, physics, mathematics and metaphysics at Leipzig from 1731, habilitated there in 1739 and became an associate professor in 1746. In 1756 he took a full professorship of natural philosophy and geometry at Göttingen, and in 1763 he succeeded Tobias Mayer as director of the observatory. His doctoral students included Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Johann Pfaff, Heinrich Wilhelm Brandes, Farkas Bolyai and Georg Klügel, and his biting epigrammatic poems, first printed without his consent in 1781, made him best known to the wider public. A lunar crater bears his name.