Carolus Linnaeus, Swedish Carl von Linné, (born May 23, 1707, Råshult, Småland, Swed.—died Jan. 10, 1778, Uppsala), Swedish botanist and explorer. He studied botany at Uppsala university and explored Swedish Lapland before traveling to the Netherlands to complete his medical degree (1735). There he became the first to develop principles for defining genera and species of organisms and to create a uniform system for naming them, binomial nomenclature. Linnaeus’s system was based mainly on flower parts, which tend to remain unchanged during evolution. Such a system was valuable in that it enabled students to place a plant rapidly in a named category. Linnaeus not only systematized the plant and animal kingdoms, but he also classified the mineral kingdom and wrote a study of the diseases known in his day. His manuscripts, herbarium, and collections are preserved by London’s Linnaean Society. His works include Systema Naturae (1735), Fundamenta Botanica (1736), and Species Plantarum (1753).
