Career
He was a professor at the University of Zurich. The Austrian botanist Otto Stapf named the plant genus Thellungia of the Poaceae family of grasses after him, and Otto Eugen Schulz named the genus Thellungiella (family Brassicaceae) in his honor. Thellung made contributions to the third (1909-1914) and fourth (1923) editions of Schinz and Keller"s Flora der Schweiz.