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.
Stephen Alexander (astronomer) Stephen Alexander (astronomer) Stephen Alexander (September 1, 1806 – June 25, 1883) was a noted astronomer and educator. He was born in Schenectady, New York. He was the brother-in-law of Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian, and worked closely with him. He graduated from Union College in 1824. He became a tutor in mathematics at Princeton University in 1832; he would later become professor of astronomy and mathematics and advocate for the construction of Princeton's first observatory. Alexander relied on the assistance of a free African American man named Alfred Scudder, who worked for him at Princeton during