University of Leipzig in the context of Neogrammarians

Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (2 May 1772 – 25 March 1801), pen name Novalis (/noʊˈvɑːlɪs/; German: [noˈvaːlɪs]), was a German aristocrat and polymath, who was a poet, novelist, philosopher and mystic. He is regarded as an influential figure of Jena Romanticism.

Novalis was born into a minor aristocratic family in Electoral Saxony. He was the second of eleven children; his early household observed a strict Pietist faith. He studied law at the University of Jena, the University of Leipzig, and the University of Wittenberg. While at Jena, he published his first poem and befriended the playwright and fellow poet Friedrich Schiller. In Leipzig, he then met Friedrich Schlegel, becoming lifelong friends. Novalis completed his law degree in 1794 at the age of 22. He then worked as a legal assistant in Tennstedt immediately after graduating. There, he met Sophie von Kühn. The following year Novalis and Sophie became secretly engaged. Sophie became severely ill soon after the engagement and died just after her 15th birthday. Sophie's early death had a life-long impact on Novalis and his writing.

Martin Haspelmath (German: [ˈmaʁtiːn ˈhaspl̩maːt]; born 2 February 1963 in Hoya, Lower Saxony) is a German linguist working in the field of linguistic typology. He is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where he worked from 1998 to 2015 and again since 2020. Between 2015 and 2020, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. He is also an honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Leipzig.

Georg Philipp Telemann (German: [ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈfiːlɪp ˈteːləman]; 24 March [O.S. 14 March] 1681 – 25 June 1767) was a German Baroque composer and multi-instrumentalist. He is one of the most prolific composers in history, at least in terms of surviving works. Telemann was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the leading German composers of the time, and he was compared favourably both to his friend Johann Sebastian Bach, who made Telemann the godfather and namesake of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, and to George Frideric Handel, whom Telemann also knew personally.

Almost completely self-taught in music, he became a composer against his family's wishes. After studying in Magdeburg, Zellerfeld, and Hildesheim, Telemann entered the University of Leipzig to study law, but eventually settled on a career in music. He held important positions in Leipzig, Sorau, Eisenach, and Frankfurt before settling in Hamburg in 1721, where he became musical director of that city's five main churches. While Telemann's career prospered, his personal life was always troubled: his first wife died less than two years after their marriage, and his second wife had extramarital affairs and accumulated a large gambling debt before leaving him. As part of his duties, he wrote a considerable amount of music for educating organists under his direction. This includes 48 chorale preludes and 20 small fugues (modal fugues) to accompany his chorale harmonisations for 500 hymns. His music incorporates French, Italian, and German national styles, and he was at times even influenced by Polish popular music. He remained at the forefront of all new musical tendencies, and his music stands as an important link between the late Baroque and early Classical styles. The Telemann Museum in Hamburg is dedicated to him.

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (/wʊnt/; German: [vʊnt]; 16 August 1832 – 31 August 1920) was a German physiologist, philosopher, professor, and one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person to call himself a psychologist.

He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology". In 1879, at the University of Leipzig, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research. This marked psychology as an independent field of study.

Walther Judeich (5 October 1859, Dresden – 24 February 1942, Jena) was a German ancient historian. His grandfather on his mother's side was publisher Heinrich Brockhaus (1804–1874).

He studied history at the Universities of Tübingen, Leipzig and Strasbourg. From 1886 to 1888 he took part in archaeological excavations in Greece and Asia Minor, followed by research in Rome, Pompeii and Sicily (1888–89). Later on, he taught classes at the Universities of Marburg, Czernowitz and Erlangen. From 1907 to 1931 he was a professor of ancient history at the University of Jena. His successor at Jena was Fritz Schachermeyr.

Gustav Weigand (1 February 1860 – 8 July 1930) was a German linguist and specialist in Balkan languages, especially Romanian and Aromanian. He is known for his seminal contributions to the dialectology of the Romance languages of the Balkans and to the study of the relationships between the languages of the Balkan sprachbund. He has also provided substantial contribution to Aromanian studies, an example of this being the discovery and publication of the contents of the Codex Dimonie.

Weigand was born in Duisburg, in the Rhine Province of Prussia. He studied Romance languages in Leipzig and wrote a doctoral thesis about the language of the Aromanians in Livadi in the region of Mount Olympus in 1888, followed by a habilitation thesis on the Megleno-Romanian language in 1892. In 1893 he founded the Romanian Institute at the University of Leipzig, the first such institution outside Romania. During the following years he continued to conduct extensive personal field studies in the Balkans. In 1908, he published a Linguistic Atlas of the Daco-Romanian speech area (German: Linguistischer Atlas des dacorumänischen Sprachgebiets), the first work of its kind in the field of Romance linguistics. During the First World War, he was sent by Imperial German authorities to conduct ethnographic studies in Macedonia, then under German occupation. The results were published in 1923.

Jean-Jacques Hublin (born 30 November 1953) is a French paleoanthropologist. He is a professor at the Max Planck Society, Leiden University and the University of Leipzig and the founder and director of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He is best known for his work on the Pleistocene hominins, and on the Neandertals and early Homo sapiens, in particular.

Hublin has been founder of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution and its president from 2010 to 2020.

Hubert Janitschek (30 October 1846 – 21 June 1893) was an Austrian-German art historian. Janitschek was born in Troppau, Silesia.

From 1868 to 1873 he studied history and philosophy at the University of Graz, followed by several years study of art history in Italy (1873–77). From 1877 to 1879 he worked in the Museum für angewandte Kunst in Vienna, and in the meantime obtained his habilitation at the University of Vienna (1878). Successively, he was a professor of art history at the universities of Prague (from 1879), Strasbourg (from 1881) and Leipzig (from 1891).

Karl Ewald Konstantin Hering (5 August 1834 – 26 January 1918) was a German physiologist who did much research in color vision, binocular perception, eye movements, and hyperacuity. He proposed opponent color theory in 1892.

Born in Alt-Gersdorf, Kingdom of Saxony, Hering studied at the University of Leipzig and became the first rector of the German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague.

Charles Hubbard Judd (February 20, 1873 – July 18, 1946) was an American educational psychologist who played an influential role in the formation of the discipline. Part of the larger scientific movement of this period, Judd pushed for the use of scientific methods to the understanding of education and, thus, wanted to limit the use of theory in the field. Judd was known for applying scientific methods to the study of educational issues.

Born in Bareilly, British India of American missionary parents, he moved to the United States with his parents Charles Wesley Judd and Sarah Hubbard Judd in 1879. Judd obtained a PhD at the University of Leipzig under the tutelage of Wilhelm Wundt. Judd was director of the Department of Education at the University of Chicago from 1909 to 1938. His works include Genetic Psychology for Teachers, Psychology of Social Institutions and Psychology of High-School Subjects (Boston, 1915).

The Paulinerkirche was a church on the Augustusplatz in Leipzig. It was built in 1231 as the Klosterkirche St. Pauli for the Dominican monastery in Leipzig. From the foundation of the University of Leipzig in 1409, it served as the university church. After the Protestant Reformation it was donated to the university and was inaugurated in 1545 by Martin Luther as the Universitätskirche St. Pauli (University Church of St Paul), later also called Unikirche. Johann Sebastian Bach was director of music for "festal" (holiday) services in 1723−25.

The church survived the war practically unscathed but was dynamited in 1968 during the communist regime of East Germany. After the reunification of Germany, it was decided to build a new university church on the site in the shape of the former church. A new building, the Paulinum (formally: "Aula und Universitätskirche St. Pauli", i.e. "Assembly Hall and University Church St. Paul"), was built on the site beginning in 2007.

Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs (29 December 1911 – 28 January 1988) was a German theoretical physicist, atomic spy, and communist who supplied information from the American, British, and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after World War II. While at the Los Alamos Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first nuclear weapons and, later, early models of the hydrogen bomb. After his conviction in 1950, he served nine years in prison in the United Kingdom, then migrated to East Germany where he resumed his career as a physicist and scientific leader.

The son of a Lutheran pastor, Fuchs attended the University of Leipzig, where his father was a professor of theology, and became involved in student politics, joining the student branch of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, an SPD-allied paramilitary organisation. He was expelled from the SPD in 1932, and joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). He went into hiding after the 1933 Reichstag fire and the subsequent persecution of communists in Nazi Germany, and fled to the United Kingdom, where he received his PhD from the University of Bristol under the supervision of Nevill Francis Mott, and his DSc from the University of Edinburgh, where he worked as an assistant to Max Born.

Heinrich August Vater (5 September 1859 in Bremen – 10 February 1930 in Dresden) was a German soil scientist and forestry scientist. Vater was a pioneer in the areas of forest soil science, land evaluation, and forest fertilization.

In 1884, he received his doctorate at Leipzig with the dissertation Die fossilen Hölzer der Phosphoritlager des Herzogthums Braunschweig. He was an employee of the Royal Saxon Geological Survey, and in 1886, qualified as a lecturer of mineralogy and geology at the Polytechnic Institute in Dresden. During the following year, he became a professor at the Academy of Forestry in Tharandt. In 1898, he became a member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina.