Fechner, Gustav Theodor (1801–87)

Fechner was a pioneer in experimental psychology and the founder of psychophysics, the speciality within psychology devoted to quantitative studies of perception. In his foundational Elemente der Psychophysik (Elements of Psychophysics) (1860), he defined the mission of the new science to be the development of an ‘exact theory of the functionally dependent relations of… the physical and the psychological worlds’. It is in this work that Fechner developed the law of sensation-magnitudes (Fechner’s Law): the strength of a sensation is proportional to the logarithmic value of the intensity of the stimulus. Among his contemporaries he was well known not only for basic research in the field of electricity, but also as the author of a number of satirical works under the name ‘Dr Mises’.