Background
Langsdorf was the son of Georg Melchior Langsdorff and Maria Margarethe Koch. His father was saltworks archivist and Hesse-Hanau Rentmeister (master of the bursary) (saltworks of Nauheim).
Langsdorf was the son of Georg Melchior Langsdorff and Maria Margarethe Koch. His father was saltworks archivist and Hesse-Hanau Rentmeister (master of the bursary) (saltworks of Nauheim).
After finishing Gymnasium (secondary school) in Idstein in 1773, Langsdorf studied, among other things, philosophy, law, and mathematics at Georg-August University of Göttingen from 1774 until autumn of 1776 with Abraham Gotthelf Kästner and then until 1777 at the University of Giessen. He finished his doctorate in 1781 in Erfurt.
He had a twin brother named Daniel Isaak. He then interned at the saltworks in Salzhausen, and subsequently devoted himself in Nidda, Hesse to the study of saltworks. In the summer semester of 1781, he was an outside lecturer at Giessen.
Foreign health reasons however, he decided against an academic career.
He pursued a career in administration and became Rentmeister and land judge in Mülheim an der Ruhr. Starting in 1784, he was active as a saltworks inspector in Gerabronn (near Rothenburg ob der Tauber), which belonged to the margravate of Ansbach at the time.
In 1798, he was given a full professorship in mechanical engineering at Erlangen. He taught there until 1804 and he subjected the 15-year-old Georg Ohm to a thorough examination of his knowledge of mathematics.
He refused an offer from Heidelberg in 1803 and accepted an offer to teach mathematics and technology at Vilnius University.
In Russia, he and his family were elevated into the hereditary aristocracy. The mathematical physics class of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences admitted him to its ranks as a non-local member in 1808. Langsdorf left the University of Erlangen in early 1809 to take up a post in the University of Heidelberg.
Langsdorf was also very interested in theological questions and published several works on this topic.
Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.