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The Most Famous

BIOLOGISTS from Denmark

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This page contains a list of the greatest Danish Biologists. The pantheon dataset contains 841 Biologists, 13 of which were born in Denmark. This makes Denmark the birth place of the 12th most number of Biologists behind Italy and Poland.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary Danish Biologists of all time. This list of famous Danish Biologists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of Danish Biologists.

Photo of Hans Christian Gram

1. Hans Christian Gram (1853 - 1938)

With an HPI of 61.45, Hans Christian Gram is the most famous Danish Biologist.  His biography has been translated into 43 different languages on wikipedia.

Hans Christian Joachim Gram (13 September 1853 – 14 November 1938) was a Danish bacteriologist noted for his development of the Gram stain, still a standard technique to classify bacteria and make them more visible under a microscope.

Photo of Wilhelm Johannsen

2. Wilhelm Johannsen (1857 - 1927)

With an HPI of 59.72, Wilhelm Johannsen is the 2nd most famous Danish Biologist.  His biography has been translated into 31 different languages.

Wilhelm Johannsen (3 February 1857 – 11 November 1927) was a Danish pharmacist, botanist, plant physiologist, and geneticist. He is best known for coining the terms gene, phenotype and genotype, and for his 1903 "pure line" experiments in genetics.

Photo of Johan Christian Fabricius

3. Johan Christian Fabricius (1745 - 1808)

With an HPI of 59.20, Johan Christian Fabricius is the 3rd most famous Danish Biologist.  His biography has been translated into 39 different languages.

Johan Christian Fabricius (7 January 1745 – 3 March 1808) was a Danish zoologist, specialising in "Insecta", which at that time included all arthropods: insects, arachnids, crustaceans and others. He was a student of Carl Linnaeus, and is considered one of the most important entomologists of the 18th century, having named nearly 10,000 species of animals, and established the basis for the modern insect classification.

Photo of Erik Pontoppidan

4. Erik Pontoppidan (1698 - 1764)

With an HPI of 57.29, Erik Pontoppidan is the 4th most famous Danish Biologist.  His biography has been translated into 27 different languages.

Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan (24 August 1698 – 20 December 1764) was a Danish author, a Lutheran bishop of the Church of Norway, a historian, and an antiquarian. His Catechism of the Church of Denmark heavily influenced Danish and Norwegian religious thought and practice for roughly the next 200 years after its 1737 publication.

Photo of Christen C. Raunkiær

5. Christen C. Raunkiær (1860 - 1938)

With an HPI of 55.54, Christen C. Raunkiær is the 5th most famous Danish Biologist.  His biography has been translated into 20 different languages.

Christen Christensen Raunkiær (29 March 1860 – 11 March 1938) was a Danish botanist, who was a pioneer of plant ecology. He is mainly remembered for his scheme of plant strategies to survive an unfavourable season ("life forms") and his demonstration that the relative abundance of strategies in floras largely corresponded to the Earth's climatic zones. This scheme, the Raunkiær system, is still widely used today and may be seen as a precursor of modern plant strategy schemes, e.g. J. Philip Grime's CSR system.

Photo of Eugenius Warming

6. Eugenius Warming (1841 - 1924)

With an HPI of 53.42, Eugenius Warming is the 6th most famous Danish Biologist.  His biography has been translated into 26 different languages.

Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming (3 November 1841 – 2 April 1924), known as Eugen Warming, was a Danish botanist and a main founding figure of the scientific discipline of ecology. Warming wrote the first textbook (1895) on plant ecology, taught the first university course in ecology and gave the concept its meaning and content. Scholar R. J. Goodland wrote in 1975: “If one individual can be singled out to be honoured as the founder of ecology, Warming should gain precedence”. Warming wrote a number of textbooks on botany, plant geography and ecology, which were translated to several languages and were immensely influential at their time and later. Most important were Plantesamfund and Haandbog i den systematiske Botanik.

Photo of Emil Christian Hansen

7. Emil Christian Hansen (1842 - 1909)

With an HPI of 52.93, Emil Christian Hansen is the 7th most famous Danish Biologist.  His biography has been translated into 17 different languages.

Emil Christian Hansen (8 May 1842 – 27 August 1909) was a Danish mycologist and fermentation physiologist. Hansen was born in Ribe to Joseph Christian Hansen, a house-painter, and his wife Ane Catherina Dyhre.He was awarded a gold medal in 1876 for an essay on fungi, titled De danske Gjødningssvampe. During his days as a university student in Copenhagen, he worked as an unpaid assistant to zoologist Japetus Steenstrup (1813–1897). In 1876, with Alfred Jørgensen (1848–1925), he published a Danish translation of Charles Darwin’s "The Voyage of the Beagle"; Rejse om Jorden. From 1879 to 1909, he was director of the physiological department at Carlsberg Laboratory.Hired by the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen in 1879, he became the first to isolate a pure cell of yeast in 1883, and after combining it with a sugary solution, produced more yeast than was in a yeast bank. It was named as Saccharomyces carlsbergensis after the laboratory, and is the yeast from which are derived, all yeasts used in lager beers. See Fermentation, Yeast. Hansen is the taxonomic authority of the fungal genus Anixiopsis (1897) from the family Onygenaceae.He was honoured in 1911, when botanist H. Zikes published Hanseniaspora, which is a genus of yeasts.

Photo of Otto Friedrich Müller

8. Otto Friedrich Müller (1730 - 1784)

With an HPI of 51.16, Otto Friedrich Müller is the 8th most famous Danish Biologist.  His biography has been translated into 22 different languages.

Otto Friedrich Müller, also known as Otto Friedrich Mueller (2 November 1730 – 26 December 1784) was a Danish naturalist and scientific illustrator.

Photo of Morten Thrane Brünnich

9. Morten Thrane Brünnich (1737 - 1827)

With an HPI of 47.78, Morten Thrane Brünnich is the 9th most famous Danish Biologist.  His biography has been translated into 26 different languages.

Morten Thrane Brünnich (30 September 1737 – 19 September 1827) was a Danish zoologist and mineralogist.

Photo of Johan Lange

10. Johan Lange (1818 - 1898)

With an HPI of 47.36, Johan Lange is the 10th most famous Danish Biologist.  His biography has been translated into 16 different languages.

Johan Martin Christian Lange (20 March 1818 – 3 April 1898) was a prominent Danish botanist. He held the post of Librarian at the Botanical library of the University of Copenhagen from 1851 to 1858. He was Director of the Botanical Garden there from 1856 to 1876, the Reader of botany at the Danish Technical University from 1857 to 1862, and Reader of Botany at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University from 1858 to 1893, achieving full professor standing in 1892. He began editing the Flora Danica in 1858, and was its last editor. Together with Japetus Steenstrup, Johan Lange was the publisher of Flora Danica fasc. 44 (1858). Thereafter, he edited alone fasc. 45-51 (1861–83) and Supplement vols 2-3 (1865–74), in total 600 plates. After having finished the publication of Flora Danica, he issued Nomenclator Floræ Danicæ in 1887 - a volume indexing all planches in Flora Danica alphabetically, systematically and chronologically. He travelled throughout Europe, completing extensive studies on the flora of Denmark, Greenland and other European countries, especially Spain. (Willkomm & Lange, Prodromus Florae Hispanicae, 1861–80). He expanded on the classification developed by Linnaeus, writing Plantenavne og navngivningsregler (Plant-names and rules for name-giving) which was influential in developing the Code of Botanical Nomenclature, the system in use today. Charles Darwin borrowed a book written by Lange, which he failed to return in a timely manner as mentioned by Darwin in his correspondence. [1] He is honoured in the naming of a fungal genus in 1891, Willkommlangea (jointly with Heinrich Moritz Willkomm (1821-1895), who was a German academic and botanist).

People

Pantheon has 13 people classified as biologists born between 1698 and 1877. Of these 13, none of them are still alive today. The most famous deceased biologists include Hans Christian Gram, Wilhelm Johannsen, and Johan Christian Fabricius. As of April 2022, 3 new biologists have been added to Pantheon including Johan Lange, Johannes Schmidt, and Christian Friedrich Ecklon.

Deceased Biologists

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Newly Added Biologists (2022)

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Overlapping Lives

Which Biologists were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 12 most globally memorable Biologists since 1700.

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