Wilhelm Julius Foerster
German astronomer (1832–1921)
Wilhelm Julius Foerster (16 December 1832 – 18 January 1921) was a German astronomer.
Biography
A native of Grünberg, Silesia, he studied at the University of Berlin and Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, and worked as Johann Franz Encke's assistant. In 1860, he co-discovered asteroid 62 Erato with Oskar Lesser, the first co-discovery on record. He became professor of astronomy at the University of Berlin in 1863. After Encke's death in 1865, he became director of the Berlin Observatory and served in this position until 1904. Foerster also taught the popular geologist Alfred Wegener astronomy.
In 1868 he was appointed director of the commission established by the North German Confederation, and continued from 1871 by the German Empire, for the determination of standards of measurement. In this capacity, he superintended the reorganization of the German system of weights and measures on the metric basis. He was elected president of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in 1891.
In 1888–89, Foerster co-founded the Urania in Berlin, an institution for astronomical education that reached out to the wider public.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q77029. VIAF identifies the subject as 65473206. The Library of Congress control number is n85800879. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1832, 1921, 1860 and 1863.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wilhelm Julius Foerster” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.