Matthew wrote:
Did you know it is Carl Linnaeus’ 300th birthday this year!  Read about him here.Â
Thank you Matthew for reminding us and sending the excellent website. Readers can google up lectures and events around the world celebrating this birthdate.
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From his earliest childhood, Linnaeus, who was born in Sweden, had a special love for plants. He liked to know the names of the plants. He received his education in medicine in both Sweden and Holland and in those days botany was part of the medical curriculum. After graduation Linnaeus was offered a professorship at his alma mater, The University of Uppsala, where he restored the University’s botanical garden arranging the plants according to his system of classification. His system was followed by his students and even today much of Linnaeus’s system in still being used in the botanical world. Linnaeus is called the Father of Taxonomy. Taxonomy is the naming, ranking, and
classifying organisms.
There is a Linnaen Society in New York and they will be having an event celebrating the great man’s birthdate. Check out this website and this website.
The Pennsylvania Horticulture Society and the Wagner Free Instutue in Phila., will co-sponsor a free Lecture series starting March 26, 2007, 7:30pm – 9:30pm.
1. Botany Before, During and After Linnaeus
Click here for more details.
Presented by Dr. Alfred E. Schuyler
Open to the public and members
PHS and the Wagner Free Institute of Science will co-sponsor this series of six lectures (Mondays, March 26 – April 30).
Dr. Alfred E. “Ernie” Schuyler will present this course focusing on Carl Linnaeus in recognition of the 300th anniversary of his birth on May 23, 1707. We will discuss the relevance of Linnaeus’s system of binomial nomenclature and the systems that he and later botanists devised to classify plants in hierarchical groups.
The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society
100 N. 20th Street, 5th Floor
Philadelphia, PA