Boris Kozo-Polianskii

Born Jan. 8 (20), 1890, in Ashkhabad; died Apr. 21, 1957, in Voronezh. Soviet botanist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1932).

Kozo-Polianskii graduated from Moscow University in 1914. He became a professor at the University of Voronezh in 1920 and an organizer and director of the Voronezh Botanical Gardens in 1937. His principal works dealt with the phylogenetic taxonomy and morphology of higher plants. He developed the euanthic theory of the origin of a flower (from a shoot with modified leaves) and, on its basis, constructed the original system of angiosperms. Kozo-Polianskii proposed a phylogenetic system for the plant world as a whole. He devised a new classification of umbellifers based on the anatomy of the fruit. He was interested in theoretical aspects of botany and in the theory of evolution (evolutionary significance of symbiosis and manifestation of the biogenetic law in plants). He discovered an accumulation of relict plants of the Timskaia Highland in Kursk Oblast. Kozo-Polianskii wrote several studies on the history of botany. He was awarded two Orders of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and a medal.