Armen Takhtajan

Armen Leonovich Takhtajan or Takhtajian (; ; pronounced takh-tuh-JAHN; 10 June 1910 – 13 November 2009), was a Soviet-Armenian botanist, one of the most important figures in 20th century plant evolution and systematics and biogeography. His other interests included morphology of flowering plants, paleobotany, and the flora of the Caucasus. He was one of the most influential taxonomists of the latter twentieth century.

Life Family Armen Takhtajan's father (left) and grandfather (right), appr. 1900 Takhtajan was born in Shushi, Russian Empire, present-day Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan, on 10 June 1910, to a family of Armenian intellectuals. His grandfather Meliksan Takhtadzhyan Petrovich had been born in Trabzon, Ottoman Empire and was educated in Italy, on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, an Armenian enclave, spoke many languages and worked as a journalist. He died in Paris in 1930. His father, Leon Meliksanovich Takhtadzhyan (1884–1950), was born in Batumi, Georgia and was educated as an agronomist at Leipzig University. Graduating in 1906, he worked on farms in France, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, and made a special study of sheep farming. He became proficient in German, French, English, Russian, Georgian and Azerbaijani. Arriving in Shushi in 1908, then a centre of sheep farming in the Caucasus, looking for work, Leon was forced to teach German at the local Realschule attached to the Armenian seminary, due to lack of opportunities in his chosen field. There he met and married Gerseliya Sergeevna Gazarbekyan (1887–1974), Armen Takhtajan's mother, a native of Susha, in 1909.

While at the Komarov Botanical Institute in Leningrad in 1940, Takhtajan developed his classification scheme for flowering plants, which emphasized phylogenetic relationships between plants. His system did not become known to botanists in the West until after 1950, and in the late 1950s he began a correspondence and collaboration with the prominent American botanist Arthur Cronquist, whose plant classification scheme was heavily influenced by his collaboration with Takhtajan and other botanists at Komarov.

He is chiefly famous as the author of works on the origins of flowering plants and paleobotany, developing a new classification system of higher plants. He worked on the "Flora of Armenia" (vol. 1–6, 1954–73) and "Fossil flowering plants of the USSR "(v. 1, 1974) books. Takhtajan also developed a system of floristic regions.(Takhtajan, Crovello and Cronquist, 1986)

For many years restrictions were placed on his work because of his opposition to the official line on genetics promoted by Lysenko.

1969. Flowering plants: origin and dispersal. Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh [Translated from Russian by C Jeffrey] 2009. Flowering Plants. Springer, New York In 1980, botanist Vandika Ervandovna Avetisyan published Takhtajaniella, which is a genus of flowering plant from Transcausica, belonging to the family Brassicaceae and it was named in his honour. Then in 1990, Nazarova published Takhtajaniantha (from the dandelion tribe within the daisy family, ) and lastly in 1997, Takhtajania (from the family Winteraceae, which was found in Madagascar) was published.