Background
Paul Knuth was born on November 20, 1854, in Greifswald, Germany. He was the son of a municipal official, and the former Sophie Bremer.
University of Greifswald, Greifswald, Germany
Knuth attended the University of Greifswald, where he was awarded the doctorate on December 30, 1876.
Botanist ecologist educator scientist
Paul Knuth was born on November 20, 1854, in Greifswald, Germany. He was the son of a municipal official, and the former Sophie Bremer.
Until August 1873 Knuth attended the Realschule, and then the University of Greifswald, where he was awarded the doctorate on December 30, 1876.
On October 1, 1876, Knuth accepted the position of provisional teacher at the Realschule in Iserlohn; he became a full member of the staff one year later, after obtaining his teaching certificate, with high honors, on July 28, 1877. After five years at Iserlohn, Knuth moved to Kiel as teacher at the Oberrealschule, beginning his duties on October 1, 1881. He remained associated with this school until his death in 1900. In 1891 he was promoted to senior teacher; on December 15, 1895, he was given the title of professor; and on December 8, 1898, he became a councilor of the fourth degree.
From 1891 Knuth was in ill health and often had to interrupt his teaching for long periods. In August 1898 he asked for permission to study at the botanical garden in Buitenzorg, Java; he stayed there from November 1898 until March 1899. On March 20, 1899, he wrote to the authorities in Kiel, seeking an extension of his leave of absence; when their refusal reached Buitenzorg in May, Knuth had already left, probably because of ill health. He returned to Kiel via Japan, California, and New York, arriving in July 1899. He died in Kiel about a year later.
Although Knuth apparently was educated as a chemist, his scientific work was in botany. This interest was probably awakened by the flora in the vicinity of Kiel and the North Sea islands. Soon he began writing books and papers on the flora of Schleswig-Holstein and the North Sea islands. He also wrote on the history of botany in Schleswig-Holstein. All this would have earned Knuth the reputation of a good regional botanist; it is his work on the fertilization of flowers that brought him fame. This field had been opened up by C. Sprengel, whose Das entdeckte Geheimnis der Natur (1783) Knuth prepared for a new edition in Ostwald’s Klassiker der Exakten Wissenschaften. The topic became of special interest after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and Darwin’s studies on forms and fertilization of flowers.
While doing work in systematics Knuth started collecting data on the identity of the insects that visit various flowers, and later he set up a network of observers to enlarge the area covered. This type of research had been started in Germany by the brothers Fritz and Hermann Muller; the latter had written a book on the subject in 1873. The numerous observations collected by Knuth made Muller’s book obsolete, so Knuth decided to publish his Handbuch der Blutenbiologie, which was planned on such an elaborate scale that it still remains the definitive handbook on the subject. Death prevented Knuth from completing more than two volumes of this work; it was continued by Otto Appel and Ernst Loew, who wrote the three subsequent volumes.
The journey to Buitenzorg had been undertaken to collect material on the fertilization of exotic plants that was to be used in later volumes. At Buitenzorg, Knuth studied the pollination history of more than 200 plants and worked on a great variety of related problems. His untimely death prevented him from working out and publishing the results of these studies.
Knuth's family was Lutheran.
Knuth was a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.