Carl Linnaeus

Born in 1707 in the Småland countryside, son of a curate, Linnaeus studied at Uppsala and began lecturing on botany by 1730. Between 1735 and 1738 he lived abroad, publishing the first edition of his *Systema Naturae* in the Netherlands - the work that formalised binomial nomenclature. Back in Sweden he became professor of medicine and botany at Uppsala, and through the 1740s was sent on expeditions across the country to find and classify plants and animals. He continued collecting and publishing volumes through the 1750s and 1760s. By his death in 1778 he was one of Europe's most acclaimed scientists, called Princeps botanicorum and considered a founder of modern ecology. In taxonomy's shorthand, the single letter *L.* still marks him as the authority behind a species' name - and he remains the type specimen for *Homo sapiens*.