Johann Peter Süssmilch

Johann Peter Süssmilch (1707 to 1767) was a German Protestant pastor, statistician and demographer, best known for his work on the divine order in the changes of the human sex, in birth, death and reproduction, an influential book in demography and the history of population statistics. He was raised in Brandenburg by his grandparents, studied at the College of Berlin and then law at Halle, but turned to theology and philosophy at Jena and defended his thesis in 1733. He served as an army chaplain in the First Silesian War, became pastor at Etzin in 1741 and provost of the St. Petri parish in Berlin in 1742, and joined the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1745. He found a long term constant ratio of 1,050 male births to 1,000 female births, which he took as proof of divine working in the world, and he also worked on life tables. He is regarded as one of the founders of demography in Germany.