Anders Celsius

Anders Celsius was a Swedish astronomer, physicist and mathematician born on 27 November 1701. He became professor of astronomy at Uppsala University in 1730, then spent three years touring Europe's leading observatories in Germany, Italy and France. In 1741 he founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory. The following year he proposed a centigrade temperature scale — in inverted form, placing the boiling point of water at zero degrees and freezing at one hundred. The scale was later flipped and renamed Celsius in his honour. He died on 25 April 1744, at forty-two.