About the Mycologists
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Biography
Biography
These pages are a presentation of the lives and scientific contributions of a group of people to the field of mycology. The people include authors of taxa, authors of papers, biological researchers, collectors, and enthusiasts. A few are not really part of the mycological field; I just included them because I thought they were cool.
This is, at present, a historical database, primarily listing people who were active before 1950. There are many reasons for this, the foremost being that biographies of biologists tend not to become available until after they die. I would like to change this. I encourage all mycologists to send me biographical information so that we can all know what we've been up to.
The other reason that the database is primarily historical is that if a given mycologist has a biography on the web, I usually refer you to that rather than go to the trouble of writing up something myself. I'm not into duplicating information, just making sure that it's out there and accessible. Likewise, I'm more likely to give lengthy quotations from older books that you're more likely to have difficulty finding. If a printed source is recent and good, I may well just refer you to that, also.
The entries are illustrated with a picture of the mycologist when that is available; if not, then a picture of a mushroom that he or she named; if I don't have one of those available, then a mushroom similar to one that he or she named. :-)
The section "Sources" on each mycologist's pages lists the sources I used for the information on the page. In "Further Sources", I listed other sources which I know about but have not had time to consult, yet. If a page contains a few short facts about the person and no "Sources" listing, they probably came from Geoffrey Clough Ainsworth, D. L. Hawksworth & P. W. James's (1971) Ainsworth & Bisby's Dictionary of the Fungi. If the page for a person seems puzzled about their connection to mycology, then I probably got that person from the list of mycological authors in D. L. Hawksworth's (1974) Mycologist's Handbook and, while I've obviously amassed enough information on the person to warrant a page for them, none of that information yet pertains to mycology.
I haven't really distinguished between "important" people and others, and I don't intend to. See, for example, the entry for George W. Clinton. I would like to extend this depth of coverage to people of comparable obscurity. By the same token, if someone isn't in here, it doesn't mean I don't think they're important. It just means that I don't have enough information on them to make an interesting/useful entry right now.
I have 1578 people in my database right now Right now, I only have enough information to warrant an entry for 341 of them. Similarly, I have 2828 publications entered in the database, with 1886 (almost exactly two thirds) showing up under the 341 authors currently featured in these webpages.
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