Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, credited as L. L. Zamenhof and sometimes as the pseudonymous Dr. Esperanto, was a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist and the creator of Esperanto, the most successful constructed language in the world. He grew up fascinated by the idea of a world without war and believed that this could happen with the help of a new international auxiliary language, which he first developed in 1873 while still in school.