Carl Linnaeus, father of modern taxonomy, is born

On May 23, 1707, Carl Linnaeus was born in southern Sweden. A physician by training, he is remembered instead as the man who imposed order on the chaos of the natural world — the “father of modern taxonomy.”

Linnaeus’s great idea was deceptively simple. Instead of long, rambling Latin descriptions, he gave each organism a two-word name: one for the genus, one for the species. Under his binomial nomenclature, the ocelot became Leopardus pardalis, and we became Homo sapiens.

He rolled the system out across nature in successive editions of his Systema Naturae, sorting living things into nested ranks of class, order, genus, and species. The scaffolding held: biologists still hang new discoveries on it nearly three centuries later.

Linnaeus died in 1778. His collections were later bought by an Englishman who founded London’s Linnean Society to preserve them — and his naming convention outlived every rival.