Olof Celsius

Olof Celsius (the elder). Engraving.

Olof Celsius (the elder) (19 July 1670 – 24 June 1756) was a Swedish botanist, philologist and clergyman, He was a professor at Uppsala University, Sweden.^[1] Celsius was a mentor of the botanist and scientist Carl Linnaeus. Celsius wrote his most famous book on biblical plants, Hierobotanicos, in 1745-47.

Olof Celsius's nephew Anders Celsius was an astronomer who invented a temperature scale where 100 represented the freezing point of water and 0 represented the boiling point. Carl Linnaeus in 1744 reversed the scale to create the centigrade scale, renamed in 1948 to the Celsius scale in use today.

Olof Celsius was made a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1739.

References

1. Encyclopædia Britannica, Retrieved on June 24, 2008
2. IPNI.  Celsius.