Olof Celsius

Olof Celsius the elder (1670 to 1756) was a Swedish botanist, philologist and clergyman who was a professor at Uppsala University and a mentor of the botanist Carl Linnaeus. His most famous book, on the plants of the Bible, was the Hierobotanicon of 1745 to 1747, and he was also a prominent runologist. His father was the mathematician Magnus Celsius, and his nephew Anders Celsius, the son of his brother Nils Celsius, who was professor of astronomy, invented a temperature scale that was later reversed to become the centigrade scale, renamed the Celsius scale in 1948. His brother Johan Celsius was a noted Swedish dramatic poet and actor. He was the father of Olof Celsius the Younger, Bishop of Lund, and of the historian and librarian Magnus von Celse. He was made a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1739.