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

Swiss Swiss most commonly refers to: * the adjectival form of Switzerland * Swiss people Swiss may also refer to: Places * Swiss, Missouri * Swiss, North Carolina * Swiss, West Virginia * Swiss, Wisconsin Other uses * Swiss Café, an old café located ...

botanist Botany, also called plant science, is the branch of natural science and biology studying plants, especially Plant anatomy, their anatomy, Plant taxonomy, taxonomy, and Plant ecology, ecology. A botanist or plant scientist is a scientist who s ...

and plant geographer. 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 lore usuall ...

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 Biogeography is the study of the species distribution, distribution of species and ecosystems in geography, geographic space and through evolutionary history of life, geological time. Organisms and biological community (ecology), communities o ...

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

genera Genus (; : genera ) is a taxonomic rank above species and below family as used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In binomial nomenclature, the genus name forms the first part of the binomial s ...

accumulate much faster than

species A species () is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. It is the basic unit of Taxonomy (biology), ...

and thereby refuting

Paul Jaccard Paul Jaccard (18 November 1868 in Sainte-Croix, Switzerland, 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 s ...

's interpretation of the

-to-

genus Genus (; : genera ) is a taxonomic rank above species and below family (taxonomy), family as used in the biological classification of extant taxon, living and fossil organisms as well as Virus classification#ICTV classification, viruses. In bino ...

ratio in Jaccard's dispute with Alvar Palmgren. Maillefer's statistical solution to the problem was later supported by an analytical solution by the Hungarian

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 (; ; December 13, 1887 – September 7, 1985) was a Hungarian-American mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. He made fundamental contributi ...

. Maillefer took his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

at the

University of Lausanne The University of Lausanne (UNIL; ) 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 Switzerland, and one of the oldest universities ...

. 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 pharmace ...

, 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