Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1 July 1742 – 24 February 1799) was a German scientist, satirist and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. Today, he is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "waste books", and for his discovery of the strange treelike patterns now called Lichtenberg figures. The Lichtenberg ratio used in ISO 216 is named after him.