In 1748 Gottfried Achenwall became an associate professor at the University of Göttingen. He gave Statistik, the systematic description of states, the form of an independent discipline. In 1749 he published an outline of the political science of the leading European states.
August Ludwig von Schlözer called him the “Vater der Statistik”, the father of statistics. The national biography adds that the word Statistik does not come from him at all.