Alexander von Bunge

Alexander Georg von Bunge (6 October 1803 to 18 July 1890, with Old Style dates of 24 September 1803 and 6 July 1890) was a Russian botanist best remembered for scientific expeditions into Asia and especially Siberia. Born in Kiev into a family of the German minority in Tsarist Russia, he was educated at Dorpat and took his doctorate in medicine at the Imperial University of Dorpat in 1825, studying botany there under Carl Friedrich von Ledebour. Working as a district physician in Barnaul, he joined Ledebour and Carl Anton von Meyer on an expedition to the Kazakh Steppe and the Altai Mountains whose 1,600 plant specimens formed the basis of the four-volume Flora Altaica, published from 1829 to 1833. In 1830 and 1831 he went on a mission to Peking and brought back 450 plant specimens, and in 1833 he was nominated a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and became professor of botany at Kazan University. From 1836 he was professor of botany at the University of Dorpat and director of its botanical garden, he joined further expeditions to Khorasan, Afghanistan and Persia in 1857 to 1859, became an honorary member of the Academy in 1875 and retired as professor in 1867.