Alexander von Humboldt

For other uses, see Alexander von Humboldt (disambiguation).

Alexander von Humboldt
Portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler (1843)
Born14 September 1769
Berlin, Prussia, Holy Roman Empire
Died6 May 1859(1859-05-06) (aged 89)
Berlin, Prussia, German Confederation
Resting placeSchloss Tegel
Alma materUniversity of Frankfurt (Oder)
University of Göttingen
Freiberg School of Mines (diploma, 1792)
Known forBiogeography, Kosmos (1845–1862), Humboldt Current, magnetic storm, Humboldtian science, Berlin Romanticism[1]
AwardsCopley Medal (1852)
Scientific career
FieldsGeography
Academic advisorsMarkus Herz, Carl Ludwig Willdenow, Abraham Gottlob Werner
Signature

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt[a] (14 September 1769 – 6 May 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science.[5] He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835).[6][7][8] Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography, while his advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement pioneered modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.[9][10] Humboldt and Carl Ritter are both regarded as the founders of modern geography as they established it as an independent scientific discipline.[11][12]

Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in the Americas, exploring and describing them for the first time from a non-Spanish European scientific point of view. His description of the journey was written up and published in several volumes over 21 years.

Humboldt resurrected the use of the word cosmos from the ancient Greek and assigned it to his multivolume treatise, Kosmos, in which he sought to unify diverse branches of scientific knowledge and culture. This important work also motivated a holistic perception of the universe as one interacting entity,[13] which introduced concepts of ecology leading to ideas of environmentalism. In 1800, and again in 1831, he described scientifically, on the basis of observations generated during his travels, local impacts of development causing human-induced climate change.[14][15][16]

Humboldt is seen as "the father of ecology" and "the father of environmentalism".[17][18]

  1. ^ Helmut Thielicke, Modern Faith and Thought, William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1990, p. 174.
  2. ^ "Humboldt". Collins English Dictionary. HarperCollins. Retrieved 11 July 2019.
  3. ^ "Humboldt". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 11 July 2019.
  4. ^ "Humboldt, Alexander von". Lexico UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 12 May 2021.
  5. ^ Malcolm Nicolson, "Alexander von Humboldt and the Geography of Vegetation", in: A. Cunningham and N. Jardine (eds.), Romanticism and the Sciences, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 169–188; Michael Dettelbach, "Romanticism and Resistance: Humboldt and "German" Natural Philosophy in Natural Philosophy in Napoleonic France", in: Robert M. Brain, Robert S. Cohen, Ole Knudsen (eds.), Hans Christian Ørsted and the Romantic Legacy in Science: Ideas, Disciplines, Practices, Springer, 2007; Maurizio Esposito, Romantic Biology, 1890–1945, Routledge, 2015, p. 31.
  6. ^ Thubron, Colin (25 September 2015). "The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 17 October 2016. Retrieved 1 March 2017.
  7. ^ Lee, Jeffrey (2014). "Von Humboldt, Alexander". The Encyclopedia of Earth. Archived from the original on 27 September 2015. Retrieved 26 September 2015.
  8. ^ Jackson, Stephen T. "Alexander von Humboldt and the General Physics of the Earth" (PDF). Science. Vol. 324. pp. 596–597. Archived (PDF) from the original on 12 April 2019. Retrieved 11 November 2015.
  9. ^ Love, J.J. (2008). "Magnetic monitoring of Earth and space" (PDF). Physics Today. February (2): 31–37. Bibcode:2008PhT....61b..31H. doi:10.1063/1.2883907. Archived (PDF) from the original on 28 July 2019. Retrieved 29 June 2015.
  10. ^ Thomson, A. (2009), "Von Humboldt and the establishment of geomagnetic observatories", IAEA-Inis, archived from the original on 4 March 2020, retrieved 8 March 2015
  11. ^ Hartshorne, Richard (1939). "The pre-classical period of modern geography". Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 29 (3): 35–48. doi:10.1080/00045603909357282 – via Taylor & Francis.
  12. ^ Kerski, Joseph J. (2016). Interpreting Our World: 100 Discoveries That Revolutionized Geography. ABC-Clio. p. 284. ISBN 9781610699204.
  13. ^ Walls, L.D. "Introducing Humboldt's Cosmos". Minding Nature. August 2009: 3–15. Archived from the original on 12 May 2019. Retrieved 4 March 2015.
  14. ^ Cite error: The named reference Paul-2017 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  15. ^ Wulf, Andrea (23 December 2015). "The Forgotten Father of Environmentalism". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 14 January 2020. Retrieved 14 January 2020.
  16. ^ "Humboldt's legacy". Nature Ecology & Evolution. 3 (9): 1265–1266. 29 August 2019. Bibcode:2019NatEE...3.1265.. doi:10.1038/s41559-019-0980-5. ISSN 2397-334X. PMID 31467435.
  17. ^ "The Father of Ecology". 19 February 2020.
  18. ^ "The Forgotten Father of Environmentalism". The Atlantic. 23 December 2015.


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