Olof Celsius Olof Celsius Olof Celsius (the elder) (19 July 1670 – 24 June 1756) was a Swedish botanist, philologist and clergyman, He was a professor at Uppsala University, Sweden. Celsius was a mentor of the botanist and scientist Carl Linnaeus. Celsius wrote his most famous book on biblical plants, "Hierobotanicon", in 1745-47. Olof Celsius's nephew Anders Celsius was an astronomer who invented a temperature scale where 100 represented the freezing point of water and 0 represented the boiling point. Jean-Pierre Christin, in 1744 reversed the scale to create the centigrade scale, renamed in 1948 to the Celsius scale in use today.
Temperature scientists measure temperature using the Celsius scale and thermodynamic temperature using the Kelvin scale, which is the Celsius scale offset so that its null point is = , or absolute zero. Many engineering fields in the U.S., notably high-tech and US federal specifications (civil and military), also use the Kelvin and Celsius scales. Other engineering fields in the U.S. also rely upon the Rankine scale (a shifted Fahrenheit scale) when working in thermodynamic-related disciplines such as combustion. The basic unit of temperature in the International System of Units (SI) is the kelvin. It has the symbol K. For everyday applications,