The Albertina magnificent botanical garden was inaugurated in 1811 during the Napoleonic Wars. Two years later, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel established his outstanding observatory next door to the garden. Other university professors included such giants of the science world as the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1806–07), the biologist Karl Ernst von Baer (1817–34), the mathematician Carl Gustav Jacobi (1829–42), the mineralogist Franz Ernst Neumann (1828–76) and the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1849–55).
