Olof Rudbeck the Younger

Olof Rudbeck the Younger (1660 to 1740) was a Swedish explorer, scientist, botanist and ornithologist, and rector of Uppsala University. Born in Uppsala, the son of the medical professor Olaus Rudbeck, he travelled to England, Holland and Germany in 1687 to study botany, took a medical degree at Utrecht in 1690, and in 1692 succeeded his father as professor of medicine at Uppsala, where he specialised in anatomy, botany, zoology and pharmacology. In 1695 he joined a royal expedition to Lapland to study its nature and mountains, and he is best remembered for Lapponia illustrata, an album of coloured pictures of birds, flowers and scenery. He helped his father with the botanical work Campi elysii, cutting woodblocks for it, and early in the eighteenth century turned to speculation about the kinship of the Sami languages with Finnish and Hungarian. He was ennobled in 1719, and his student Carl Linnaeus named the genus Rudbeckia after him and his father. His sister Wendela married into the family from which the Nobels descend.