Hermann Ebbinghaus

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 Februar…