Humboldt

Not too many people in the Western world knew about the aforementioned Russian scientist Varnadsky until recently but I am ashamed to say I had not really known much about Humboldt till I briefly read up about him just now. Being a student of science for many years now, I understand the realms of physics and chemistry to some extent and have from time to time read* about the lives and achievements of famous scientists who contributed to these fields over the years but somehow my exposure has been limited in the fields of geography, biology, ecology, and their intersection - fields to which Humboldt and Varnadsky contributed greatly. (A few different books about Darwin - this on in particular - as well as Darwin's own writings and his autobiography, wait patiently on my to-read list!) Humboldt is known today as the founder of modern geography but as wikipedia enlightens, he was more than that...

Alexander von Humboldt or Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt (1769-1859) was a Prussian naturalist and explorer.... His quantitative work on botanical geography was foundational to the field of biogeography. He was one of the first to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic were once joined (South America and Africa in particular). Late in life, in his five-volume work Kosmos, he attempted to unify the various branches involved in knowledge of the world.

BBC's In our Time had a special show dedicated to him.

Darwin described him as 'the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived'. Goethe declared that one learned more from an hour in his company than eight days of studying books and even Napoleon was reputed to be envious of his celebrity. We're talking about the Prussian scientist and explorer Alexander Von Humboldt. If you haven't heard of him you're not alone and yet, at the time of his death in 1859, the year Darwin published On the Origin of Species, Humboldt was probably the most famous scientist in Europe. Add to this shipwrecks, homosexuality and Spanish American revolutionary politics and you have the ingredients for one of the more extraordinary lives lived in Europe (and elsewhere) in the 18th and 19th centuries.

* I should say...I have read and own a copy of Primo Levi's book, Periodic Table, recently awarded the title of best science book ever written!