Georg Friedrich Parrot

Georg Friedrich Parrot (5 July 1767 – 1852) was a German scientist, the first rector of the Imperial University of Dorpat.

Georges-Frédéric Parrot was born in Mömpelgard (now Montbéliard) (then part of the Duchy of Württemberg, from 1806 in France). His father, a surgeon by profession and the local duke’s physician in ordinary, had a respectable position in the society becoming the mayor of his hometown. As the family was Protestants, they sent Georg Friedrich to study physics and mathematics in Stuttgart, the capital of the Duchy (1782–1786). For several years after graduation, Parrot took positions as a private tutor in France and Germany, and in 1795 in Livonia, one of the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire. His reasons for leaving Germany were mainly economic: as he was recently married, he needed a more regular income than he could gain from giving occasional private classes in mathematics and attending to various contests of inventions. His talent was noticed and he was appointed to be the first secretary of the Livonian Charitable and Economic Society (Livländische gemeinnützige und ökonomische Sozietät) founded in 1796 in Riga, the capital of Livonia, for the promotion of science and new ideas of management. At that time, there was no longer a university in the region. Although King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden had founded the Academia Gustaviana in 1632, it had ceased to exist in 1710 when Peter the Great had conquered the Baltic Sea provinces. Only in 1802 was the university re-founded by the order of the Emperor Alexander I as the only German-language and Lutheran university in the Russian Empire. Parrot was initially appointed to the Chair of Pure and Applied Mathematics but after defending his doctoral dissertation “On the influence of Physics and Chemistry on Pharmacy” (Über den Einfluss den Physic und Chemie auf die Arzneikunde) in 1802, he was appointed to the Chair of Physics.

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