In all scientific literature, you'll notice a common pattern between names such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Homo sapiens: they all have two-part names, or binomial nomenclature. So who came up with this system? That person is Carolus Linnaeus (also known as Carl Linnaeus, also known as Carl von Linne).
Carl was born in 1707 in Sweden to a family of practicing Christians; his father, Nils was an active church assistant and an avid teacher to his kids. Nils taught Carl religion, botany, and Latin before Carl could walk. Noting his son's intelligence, Nils hired a private tutor when Carl was just seven years old! Carl was held back from university after secondary school, however, because his teachers expected him to be well versed in Greek, Hebrew, mathematics, and theology--the source of a classical education--but one of his teachers, a doctor, took him in to train him in anatomy, physiology, and further botany instead. Carl pursued his interests in the sciences during his college career, and though he didn't have enough money to do more than visit a few lectures by his second year, a university professor gave Linnaeus access to his personal library to continue his studies. Soon, by teaching botany in his university's garden, Linnaeus was able to begin paying for classes again and continued college for a couple years. He became recognized as a better botany teacher than the other lecturers at his university and was himself hired as a lecturer in 1730 at just 23 years of age.
A year later, Linnaeus began taking notes about improving the way plants were classified, and another year later, he was funded to take an expedition to Lapland in northern Sweden. In the span of about half a year, he traveled 1,250 miles while taking notes on the native plants, birds, and geography he observed, and he discovered about 100 new plants! In his publication about the plants he saw, he used the two-part Linnaean or binomial naming system that's now implemented across the world today.
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