Arthur Maillefer (25 July 1880 – 21 November 1960) was a

Swiss Swiss may refer to: * the adjectival form of Switzerland * Swiss people Places * Swiss, Missouri *Swiss, North Carolina * Swiss, West Virginia * Swiss, Wisconsin Other uses * Swiss-system tournament, in various games and sports *Swiss Internati ...

botanist and

plant geographer Phytogeography (from Greek φυτόν, ''phytón'' = "plant" and γεωγραφία, ''geographía'' = "geography" meaning also distribution) or botanical geography is the branch of biogeography that is concerned with the geographic distribution ...

. He studied numerous classic botanical disciplines, including

plant systematics The history of plant systematics—the biological classification of plants—stretches from the work of ancient Greek to modern evolutionary biologists. As a field of science, plant systematics came into being only slowly, early plant lo ...

and floristics. He also was very modern in his use of numerical analysis and mathematics. For instance, he made one of the earliest

null model In mathematics, for example in the study of statistical properties of graphs, a null model is a type of random object that matches one specific object in some of its features, or more generally satisfies a collection of constraints, but which is ...

s in biogeography showing that - in records of plant or animal species over space -

genera Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial ...

accumulate much faster than

species In biology, a species is the basic unit of Taxonomy (biology), classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of ...

and thereby refuting

Paul Jaccard Paul Jaccard (18 November 1868 in Sainte-Croix – 9 May 1944 in Zurich) was a professor of botany and plant physiology at the ETH Zurich. He studied at the University of Lausanne and ETH Zurich (PhD 1894). He continued studies in Paris with G ...

's interpretation of the

-to-

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial n ...

ratio in Jaccard's dispute with

Alvar Palmgren Alvar Palmgren (28 April 1880 – 30 November 1960) was a Finnish botanist and plant ecologist. Palmgren studied botany at the University of Helsinki under professor J.P. Norrlin. He graduated (Fil.kand.) in 1906 and obtained his Ph.D. in 1914. ...

. Maillefer's statistical solution to the problem was later supported by an analytical solution by the

Hungarian Hungarian may refer to: * Hungary, a country in Central Europe * Kingdom of Hungary, state of Hungary, existing between 1000 and 1946 * Hungarians, ethnic groups in Hungary * Hungarian algorithm, a polynomial time algorithm for solving the assignme ...

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

George Pólya George Pólya (; hu, Pólya György, ; December 13, 1887 – September 7, 1985) was a Hungarian mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. He made fundamenta ...

. Maillefer took his

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper ''Piled Higher and Deeper'' (also known as ''PhD Comics''), is a newsp ...

at the

University of Lausanne The University of Lausanne (UNIL; french: links=no, Université de Lausanne) in Lausanne, Switzerland was founded in 1537 as a school of Protestant theology, before being made a university in 1890. The university is the second oldest in Switze ...

. He became extraordinary professor in 1919 and succeeded his former doctoral advisor,

Ernst Wilczek Ernst Wilczek (12 January 1867 in Laupen – 30 September 1948 in Lausanne) was a Swiss botanist and pharmacist. In 1892 he obtained his PhD from the University of Zurich, subsequently becoming an associate professor of systematic and pharmac ...

, in the chair of botany in 1949. From 1938 to 1950, he was also director of the Botanical Museum of the Canton.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Maillefer, Arthur 20th-century Swiss botanists University of Lausanne alumni Academic staff of the University of Lausanne 1880 births 1960 deaths