Carl Ritter (August 7, 1779 – September 28, 1859) was a German geographer. Along with Alexander von Humboldt, he is considered one of the founders of modern geography, as they established it as an independent scientific discipline. From 1825 until his death, he occupied the first chair in geography at the University of Berlin.

Carl Ritter was born in Quedlinburg, one of the six children of a doctor, F. W. Ritter.

Ritter's father died when he was two. At the age of five, he was enrolled in the Schnepfenthal Salzmann School, a school focused on the study of nature (apparently influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writings on children's education). This experience would influence Ritter throughout his life, as he retained an interest in new educational modes, including those of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Indeed, much of Ritter's writing was based on Pestalozzi's three stages in teaching: the acquisition of the material, the general comparison of material, and the establishment of a general system.

After completion of his schooling, Ritter was introduced to Bethmann Hollweg, a banker in Frankfurt. It was arranged that Ritter should become tutor to Hollweg's children, but that in the meantime he should attend the University of Halle at his patron's expense. His duties as tutor began in 1798 and continued for fifteen years. The years 1814–1819, which he spent at Göttingen in order still to watch over his pupils, were those in which he began to exclusively study geography. It was there that he courted and married Lilli Kramer, from Duderstadt and that he wrote and published the first two volumes of his Erdkunde.

In 1819, he became professor of history at Frankfurt, and in 1820, he received a teaching appointment in history at the University of Berlin. Ritter received his doctorate there in 1821, and was appointed professor extraordinarius in 1825. He also lectured at a nearby military college. He was particularly interested in the exploration of Africa and held constant contacts with British scholars and scientific circles like the Royal Geographical Society. He was one of the academic teachers of the explorer Heinrich Barth, who traveled in Northern and Western Africa on behalf of the British government to negotiate treaties that were to stop the Trans-Saharan slave trade. Carl Ritter himself was a dedicated anti-slavery propagandist in Germany.

Ritter's impact on geography was especially notable because he brought forth a new conception of the subject. In his view:

geography was a kind of physiology and comparative anatomy of the earth: rivers, mountains, glaciers, &c., were so many distinct organs, each with its own appropriate functions; and, as his physical frame is the basis of the man, determinative to a large extent of his life, so the structure of each country is a leading element in the historic progress of the nation. The earth is a cosmic individual with a particular organization, an ens sui generis with a progressive development: the exploration of this individuality of the earth is the task of geography.

In 1822, Ritter was elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and in 1824, he became a corresponding member of the Société Asiatique de Paris. In 1828, he established the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin (Berlin Geographical Society). He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1849. In 1856, he was appointed curator of the Royal Cartographic Institute of Prussia. He died in Berlin in 1859.