Anders Celsius

Anders Celsius (27 November 1701 to 25 April 1744) was a Swedish astronomer, physicist and mathematician, born in Uppsala into a family of scientists: his father Nils was a professor of astronomy, his uncle Olof a botanist, and his grandfathers the mathematician Magnus Celsius and the astronomer Anders Spole. He became professor of astronomy at Uppsala University in 1730 and held the chair until 1744, travelling from 1732 to 1735 to observatories in Germany, Italy and France. In 1730 he published a new method for determining the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and he studied the aurora with his assistant Olof Hiorter, being the first to suggest a link between it and changes in the Earth's magnetic field. He founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741 and in 1742 proposed an inverted form of the centigrade temperature scale, later renamed in his honour.