(born July 5, 1904, Kempten, Ger.—died Feb. 3, 2005, Bedford, Mass., U.S.) German-born U.S. biologist. He received a Ph.D. (1926) from the University of Berlin and immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1930s. While a curator at the American Museum of Natural History (1932–53), he wrote more than 100 papers on avian taxonomy. From 1953 to 1975 he taught at Harvard University. His early studies of speciation and of founder populations made him a leader in the development of the modern synthetic theory of
evolution. In 1940 Mayr proposed a definition of species that won wide acceptance and led to the discovery of some previously unknown species. His influential works include
Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) and
The Growth of Biological Thought (1982).
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica
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