Alexander von Humboldt

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), younger brother of Wilhelm, was a Prussian polymath and naturalist, regarded with Carl Ritter as a founder of modern geography. As a boy he collected and labelled plants, shells and insects, earning the nickname the little apothecary, and he trained as a scientific explorer at Frankfurt (Oder), Göttingen and Freiberg.

In Paris he met the botanist Aimé Bonpland, and from 1799 to 1804 the two travelled across the Spanish Americas with the permission of the Spanish crown. They covered thousands of miles, tracing the source of the Orinoco, and in 1802 Humboldt climbed Mount Chimborazo to a record altitude for a Westerner.

His quantitative work on plant distribution by altitude and climate founded biogeography, and he described human-caused climate change as early as 1800. His multi-volume Kosmos presented nature as one interacting whole. He died in Berlin in 1859 and was buried at Tegel.