Andrei Nikolaevich Beketov

Andrei Nikolaevich Beketov was a Russian botanist, educator, organizer and popularizer of science, and a public figure. He is the founder of the geography of vegetation in Russia. The future scientist was born in the village of Alferyovka in the Saratov Governorate. After graduating from the First St. Petersburg Gymnasium, he entered the Oriental Faculty of St. Petersburg University. For a time he served as a junker in the Life Guards Jäger Regiment, but soon abandoned a military career and continued his studies in the natural sciences department of the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Kazan University.

 

After graduating from university, Beketov taught natural science for three years at the Tiflis Gymnasium, while concurrently conducting botanical research on the flora of the Transcaucasus. In 1853 he received the degree of Master of Botany. In 1858 he defended his doctoral dissertation "On the morphological relations of leaf parts to each other and to the stem" and headed the Department of Botany at Kharkov University. From 1861 he held the position of extraordinary professor at St. Petersburg University, and from 1863 he was the head of the Department of Botany. From 1867 to 1876 he served as dean of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, and from 1876 to 1883 he held the office of rector of the university.

 

Beketov is the author of the first comprehensive work on the geography of plants in Russia. He carried out extensive studies of the plant world in various regions of Russia, translated works of foreign botanists into Russian, initiated the establishment of the Higher Women's (Bestuzhev) Courses and, together with Kh. Ya. Gobi, organized the publication of the first Russian botanical journal "Botanical Notes". His contribution to the development of botany and higher education is invaluable. Andrei Nikolaevich Beketov died on July 1, 1902, in Shakhmatovo, Moscow Governorate, at the age of 76.