“My Longing to Serve Society”
Gerhard Friedrich Mueller — a Man and Scholar

А.М. Panfilov

Mueller lived a long life. His autobiographical Description of My Services, written in 1775 at the age of seventy, begins with a melancholic phrase, “Out of all those who were with me at the initial foundation of the Academy there are none alive but Respected Professor Bernoulli in Bazel.” Yet in this remark one should not see a tired sigh of an old man who outlived his contemporaries. It seems that Mueller did not know what old age was — with its illnesses, immobility, lack of the future, misapprehension of the present, stiff adherence to the past, with its impotence, and grumbling. But the opposite is also true — old age did not “know” Mueller. Even in his seventies he remained greedy for work, light on his feet, collected and dedicated.

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