ABSTRACT:

Elias Landolt was born on July 24, 1926 in Zurich, Switzerland. He read biology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH: Eidgeno¨ssische Technische Hochschule) where in 1950 he completed his undergraduate work on: ‘‘Synergismen im Bereich von Mikroorganismen’’, and in 1953 graduated with the Ph. D. thesis ‘‘Untersuchungen u¨ber die Artengruppe Ranunculus montanus Willd. in den Alpen und im Jura’’. From 1953 to 1955 he was carrying out postgraduate studies at the Department of Plant Biology of the Carnegie Institution, Stanford University, California (USA), and also at the Earhard Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology (CALTECH) in Pasadena. This was the beginning of his research on duckweeds which resulted in the first publication about the group (Landolt, 1955). His habilitation thesis dealt with physiological and ecological aspects of duckweeds, and the resulting paper was published in 1957. From 1964 to his retirement in 1993 he was tenured professor at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) and from 1966 to 1993 he was also director of the Geobotanical Institute of the same institution. He passed away aged over 86 years on April 1, 2013. (Figs. 1 and 2)