Robert Folger Thorne
American botanist (1920-2015)
Robert F. Thorne (July 13, 1920 – March 24, 2015) was an American botanist. He was taxonomist and curator emeritus at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden and professor emeritus at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. His research has contributed to the understanding of the evolution of flowering plants.
Life
Thorne was born on July 13, 1920, in Spring Lake, New Jersey. He was educated through high school in Gulfport and St. Petersburg, Florida. He graduated summa cum laude in 1941 with a major in botany from Dartmouth College and earned a M.S. degree in economic botany in 1942 at Cornell University. He spent about three years serving in the armed forces during World War II, first at Hondo Navigation School, Texas, graduating as a second lieutenant in aerial navigation in 1943. Then, after 7 months in Italy in 1944 as a B-24 bomber navigator with 40 missions over eastern and southern Europe, he served as an instructor and as an examinations officer at Ellington Field, Texas, from 1944 to 1945.
After serving in the armed forces, he earned his Ph.D. in economic botany at Cornell University in 1949, studying under professors Walter Muenscher and Arthur Eames.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert Folger Thorne” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.