Anders Celsius

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anders Celsius (November 27, 1701 – April 25, 1744) was a Swedish astronomer. Celsius was born in Uppsala in Sweden. He was professor of astronomy at Uppsala University from 1730 to 1744, but traveled from 1732 to 1735 visiting notable observatories in Germany, Italy and France.

At Nuremberg in 1733 he published a collection of 316 observations of the aurora borealis made by himself and others over the period 1716-1732. In Paris he advocated the measurement of an arc of the meridian in Lapland, and in 1736 took part in the expedition organized for that purpose by the French Academy of Sciences.

Celsius was the founder of the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741. He is best known for the Celsius temperature scale, first proposed in a paper to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1742.

He died of tuberculosis in Uppsala. The Celsius crater on the Moon is named after him.

[edit] Publications

• Nova Methodus distantiam solis a terra determinandi (1730) (New Method for determining the distance from the Sun to the earth)
• De observationibus pro figura telluris determinanda (1738) (On observations for determining the shape of the earth)

[edit] External links

• Biography from Uppsala Astronomical Observatory

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• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.