# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/hermann-ebbinghaus
# Generated: 2026-09-02T06:55:49.393Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/hermann-ebbinghaus"
name: "Hermann Ebbinghaus"
slug: "hermann-ebbinghaus"
description: "He turned memory from philosophical musing into hard data — inventing the forgetting curve and proving that what we retain drops fast, then levels off, unless we space the repetition just right."
tagline: "German psychologist (1850-1909)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Ebbinghaus2.jpg?width=1200"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "Germany"
  isoCode: "DE"
category:
  name: "Academics"
  slug: "academics"
profileType:
  name: "Academic"
  slug: "academic"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1850-01-24"
deathDate: "1909-02-26"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           54.48
  momentum:             0
  historical:           24.025216
  currentAttention:     0
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "FALLING"
ranks:
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  country:  null
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  - name: "Philosophy"
    slug: "philosophy"
  - name: "Psychology"
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  - name: "19th Century"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Hermann Ebbinghaus was born on 24 January 1850 in Germany, at a time when memory was considered too subjective to measure. He built the experimental study of memory from scratch, using himself as subject and nonsense syllables as material to strip out meaning's interference. In the process he discovered the forgetting curve — the steep drop-off of retention over time — and the spacing effect, which showed that distributed practice beats cramming. He also became the first to describe the learning curve. His work gave psychology one of its earliest quantitative foundations. He died on 26 February 1909, leaving behind not only those curves but a son, Julius Ebbinghaus, who became a neo-Kantian philosopher.