Wladimir Köppen

Born in 1846 in Russia, Wladimir Köppen studied in St. Petersburg before relocating to Germany and Austria, where he spent most of his working life. In 1884 he proposed a system for classifying the world's climates—a framework that, with adjustments, remains the standard more than a century later. He contributed across geographies: meteorology, botany, the structure of the atmosphere. He even coined the term "aerology" for the study of the upper air. He died in 1940, having organized the planet's weather into a language still spoken.