HackingTheUniverse

Considered to be the father of modern taxonomy, and one of the fathers of ecology, Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist born in 1707. He created a standardized system of classification and nomenclature to organize the data he collected on plants and animals.

Linnaeus published a book called, “Systema Naturae” which began as an eleven page pamphlet in 1735 and grew to 2400 pages by 1768. It outlined a hierarchical classification of the natural world, which created the division of the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, and the mineral kingdom. The system had five levels: kingdom, class, order, genus and species.

While Linnaeus was not the first to classify knowledge, his scheme was so comprehensive that he has become known as creating the field of taxonomy. A taxonomy is a categorization outline that is usually hierarchical and can expand to accommodate any new data that is collected. A taxonomy can be used to organize any set of data. The Dewey decimal system used to categorize books in libraries is an example of a taxonomy.

PRECURSOR:
-2650 – Nung
-0384 – Aristotle
-0372 – Theophrastus
0020 – Plinius
0040 – Dioscorides
0452 – T’ao Hung-Ching
1250 – Magnus
1519 – Cesalpino
1560 – Bauhin
1602 – van Stapel
1627 – Ray
1656 – de Tournefort

CONCURRENT:
1694 – Camerer
1707 – de Buffon
1727 – Adanson

SUBSEQUENT:
1744 – de Lamarck
1748 – de Jussieu
1749 – Goethe
1778 – de Candolle
1809 – Darwin
1811 – Strickland
1834 – Haeckel
1843 – Kuntze
1851 – Dewey
1883 – Chatton
1920 – Whittaker
1928 – Woese

SEE ALSO:
A film about Carl Linnaeus | Natural History Museum – [youtube.com]