Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences | |
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Motto | att främja vetenskaperna och stärka deras inflytande i samhället (to promote the sciences and strengthen their influence in society) |
Formation | 2 June 1739 |
Headquarters | Stockholm, Sweden |
Membership | 1600 Fellows 175 Foreign Members |
President | Svante Lindqvist |
Website | www.kva.se |
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences or Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien ("KVA") is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. The Academy is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization which acts to promote the sciences, primarily the natural sciences and mathematics.
The Academy was founded on 2 June 1739 by naturalist Carl Linnaeus, mercantilist Jonas Alströmer, mechanical engineer Mårten Triewald, civil servants Sten Carl Bielke and Carl Wilhelm Cederhielm, and politician Anders Johan von Höpken.[1]
The purpose of the academy was to focus on practically useful knowledge, and to publish in Swedish in order to widely disseminate the academy's findings. The academy was intended to be different from the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, which had been founded in 1719 and published in Latin. The location close to the commercial activities in Sweden's capital (which unlike Uppsala did not have a university at this time) was also intentional. The academy was modeled after the Royal Society of London and Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris, France, which some of the founding members were familiar with.
Committees of the Academy act as selection boards for international prizes:
and national prizes:[7]
Contents |
The following persons have served as permanent secretaries of the Academy:
The transactions of the Academy (Vetenskapsakademiens handlingar) were published as its main series between 1739 and 1974. In parallel, other major series have appeared and gone:
The Academy started to publish annual reports in physics and chemistry (1826), technology (1827), botany (1831), and zoology (1832). These lasted into the 1860s, when they were replaced by the single Bihang series (meaning: supplement to the transactions). Starting in 1887, this series was once again split into four sections (afdelning), which in 1903 became independent scientific journals of their own, titled "Arkiv för..." (archive for...), among them
Further restructuring of their topics occurred in 1949 and 1974.
The Academy's first online-only (born digital) journal is Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence or "ETAI" (ISSN 1403-3534). It was founded in 1997 by Erik Sandewall, professor of computer science at Linköping University.
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