Paul Knuth
Paul Erich Otto Wilhelm Knuth was a 19th-century German botanist and pollination ecologist.
He studied chemistry and natural history at the University of Greifswald and obtained his doctorate degree in 1876. He then took up a career as "high school" teacher, first in Iserlohn in Westphalia and from 1881 in Kiel. Parallel with his teaching duties, he found time to study the flora of Schleswig-Holstein and the North Frisian Islands and meticulous studies of plant-pollinator interactions, which he published in his monumental work Handbuch der Blütenbiologie. From 1891 he suffered from illness. He was granted leave of absence to visit the botanic garden at Buitenzorg in Java, where he stayed for five months and did pollination studies. He returned to Kiel via Japan, California and New York.
