Wilhelm Julius Foerster

A native of Grünberg, Silesia, he studied at the University of Berlin and Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn,[1] and worked as Johann Franz Encke's assistant.

Foerster also taught the popular geologist Alfred Wegener astronomy.

In this capacity, he superintended the reorganization of the German system of weights and measures on the metric basis.

[1] In 1888–89, Foerster co-founded the Urania in Berlin, an institution for astronomical education that reached out to the wider public.

While he was among the 93 German intellectuals in signing the Aufruf an die Kulturwelt manifesto in support of the war, Foerster was one of only four intellectuals to sign the Aufruf an die Europäer counter-manifesto (the others were Albert Einstein, the philosopher Otto Buek, and its author, the physiologist Georg Friedrich Nicolai).