Carl Linnaeus

Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish naturalist and physician who established the modern framework for naming and classifying living things. His two-part naming system, a genus name followed by a specific epithet, replaced the long descriptive Latin phrases naturalists had used before him. Appointed professor of medicine at Uppsala University in 1741, Linnaeus built the university's Academic Garden into a hub of teaching, experimentation and international correspondence. His Species Plantarum (1753) applied binomial nomenclature consistently to plants for the first time and remains the official starting point for plant scientific names, while the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae (1758) plays the same role for animal names. Linnaeus lived from 1707 to 1778.