astronomy

Nikolai Turczaninow

Nikolai Turczaninow is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Nikolai Turczaninow rather than just read about it. In short: Nikolai Stepanovich Turchaninov, traditionally spelled Turczaninow (Russian: Николай Степанович Турчанинов; 1796 – 7 January 1864 [O.S. 26 December 1863]) was a Russian botanist and plant collector who first identified several genera and many species of plants. Education and career Born in 1796, Turczaninow attended high school in Kharkov.

Key takeaways

Nikolai Turczaninow belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Nikolai Turczaninow to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Nikolai Turczaninow from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Nikolai Stepanovich Turchaninov, traditionally spelled Turczaninow (Russian: Николай Степанович Турчанинов; 1796 – 7 January 1864 [O.S. 26 December 1863]) was a Russian botanist and plant collector who first identified several genera and many species of plants.

Education and career Born in 1796, Turczaninow attended high school in Kharkov. In 1814, he graduated from Kharkov University, before working as a civil servant for the Ministry of Finance in St. Petersburg. Soon after, in 1825, Turczaninow published his first botanical list. Despite being employed in a different field, he continued his largely self-taught botanical work. In 1828, he was assigned an administrative post in Irkutsk, Siberia. This allowed him to collect in the Lake Baikal area, which is known for its rich biodiversity. A spate of papers followed, and Turczaninow established his own herbarium containing plants from the region. In 1830, he was appointed a Fellow of the Imperial Botanic Garden St. Petersburg (now the Saint Petersburg Botanical Garden), and charged with collecting plants from Siberia. In the early 1830s, Turczaninow published numerous papers on the botany of Siberia and Mongolia, most of which appeared in the Bulletin de la Société impériale des naturalistes de Moscou. During his career, Turczaninow corresponded and exchanged specimens with eminent botanists of the era, including Augustin Pyramus de Candolle, George Bentham, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and Joachim Steetz, among others. In 1837, he was sent to Krasnoyarsk where he continued to publish botanical names. He also became governor of the region. Turczaninow later opened a herbarium in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. After a debilitating fall, he allowed others to collect for him and he spent his time in classification, study and writing. In particular, Turczaninow began work on collections sent to him from the Swan River Colony in Western Australia by botanist James Drummond. Despite never visiting the country, he published over 400 species of Australian flora. Turczaninow eventually moved back to Kharkov in 1847, taking most of his herbarium with him. Many of these specimens, including known type specimens, were transferred to the National Herbarium of Ukraine (KW). Many herbaria around the world also hold collections made by Turczaninow, including the Komarov Botanical Institute, the National Herbarium of Victoria at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, Harvard University Herbaria and the herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Standard author abbreviation

Turczaninow named almost 2500 plant species. See: Category:Taxa named by Nikolai Turczaninow and International Plant Name Index

Prizes 1857: Demidov Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences

List of selected publications

Legacy The open access journal Turczaninowia, which publishes on systematics and phylogeny of plants, study of plant diversity, florogenesis, anatomy and morphology of plants, is named after him. Several plant species have been named after him, including Connarus turczaninowii, Hydrocotyle turczaninowii, and Sisymbrium turczaninowii. Also in 1836, Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle published Turczaninovia, which is a monotypic genus of flowering plants from Russia to China, belonging to the family Asteraceae. It was named in Nikolai Turczaninow's honour.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Nikolai Turczaninow

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Nikolai Turczaninow claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Nikolai Turczaninow before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Nikolai Turczaninow ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Nikolai Turczaninow

In research: Nikolai Turczaninow appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Nikolai Turczaninow in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Nikolai Turczaninow is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1796 births, 1863 deaths, 19th-century botanists from the Russian Empire, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Nikolai Turczaninow outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Nikolai Turczaninow in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Nikolai Turczaninow means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Nikolai Turczaninow out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Nikolai Turczaninow in simple terms?

Why does Nikolai Turczaninow matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Nikolai Turczaninow?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Nikolai Turczaninow.