Joachim Jungius

Joachim Jungius (Lübeck, 1587 – Hamburg, 1657) was a German mathematician, physician, logician and philosopher of science. He belonged to the late scholastic tradition but stayed open to the new ideas of his age, and he is remembered as one of the important scientific minds of the seventeenth century.

He studied at Rostock and Giessen, taught mathematics, and took his medical doctorate at Padua in 1619. After practising medicine in Lübeck and teaching at Rostock and Helmstedt, he settled in Hamburg in 1629 to teach natural sciences. Around 1622 he founded the Societas Ereunetica sive Zetetica, one of the earliest natural history societies north of the Alps. He held that science should rest on mathematics, his corpuscular chemistry assumed the conservation of mass, and he saw logic as a check on metaphysical and mystical speculation.

His Logica Hamburgensis, published in 1638, presented late medieval logic and showed arguments that did not fit simple forms of inference. His botanical works, Doxoscopia and Isagoge phytoscopica, appeared posthumously thanks to his students.

His botanical ideas were far ahead of their time and had no immediate influence. John Ray used them in his classification, and through Ray they reached Linnaeus. Leibniz praised him as one of the most capable minds of his age.