Prussian Academy of Sciences

The Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences was an academy established in Berlin, Germany, on 11 July 1700, four years after the Prussian Academy of Arts. Prince-elector Frederick III of Brandenburg founded it, as the Electoral-Brandenburger Society of Sciences, on the advice of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was appointed its first president. It was renamed when Frederick was crowned King in Prussia in 1701, and unlike other academies of its day it was the first to teach both sciences and humanities. Under Frederick the Great it was reorganised in 1744 and 1746 as a French-language institution, and its membership was strong in mathematics and philosophy, including Leonhard Euler, Joseph-Louis Lagrange and Immanuel Kant. It built an observatory in 1709, a botanical garden in 1718 and a laboratory in 1753. Albert Einstein presented his field equations of general relativity to the Academy on 25 November 1915.