Arpad Degen

* Bratislava, March 31, 1866 – † Budapest, March 30, 1934 / physician, botanist, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1928) ; ; His father, Gusztáv Degen (1834–1903), was a lawyer, politician, and a teacher at the Košice Law Academy (between 1857–1861) and then the Bratislava Law Academy (between 1861–1884). Árpád Degen completed his high school studies in his hometown. Already while still a high school student, he studied the flora of the Danube groves, the Lesser Carpathians, the Moravian Plain and Austria, and from 1883 until he was in the eighth grade of high school, he published 4 articles. He graduated from the University of Budapest in 1889 with a medical degree. Between 1889 and 1896, he worked as an operating surgeon at the surgical clinic of the University of Budapest, and then as a private physician. From 1896 until his death, he was the head of the Budapest Seed Testing Station (later Institute) that he founded. In 1915, he was temporarily appointed to head the Central Viticultural Experimental Station and Ampelological Institute. In 1897, he became a private teacher of phytography at the University of Budapest, and from 1927, a public full professor at the University of Szeged. He was the vice-president and then honorary president of the Botanical Department of the Natural History Society. He mainly dealt with agricultural botany, the physiological foundations of seeds and plant breeding. Some international methods of seed testing were developed by him and by a widely recognized institute under his leadership. His most significant work as a flora researcher. He primarily researched the flora of Hungary, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. He was the best expert on the flora of the Balkans at the time. In his 110-part series of studies in German (Österreichische botanische Zeitschrift) and Hungarian (Magyar Botanikai Lapok), he described many new plant species, including genera unknown in the flora of Europe, one of which (Degenia) and many other plants bear his name. He left his herbarium containing 300,000 specimens to the MNM. He started and edited the Magyar Botanikai Lapok from 1902 until his death. More than 1,000 of his studies and reviews were published in specialized journals. ; ; His main works: ; Collection of Hungarian herbs I–VIII., 1900–1914, ; The Hungarian royal state seed testing stations, 1907, ; Collection of Hungarian sedges, sedges, cattails and frog-bushes I–V., 1914–1928, ; The role of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the development of botanical sciences (with Sándor Mágócsy-Dietz), 1933, ; Flora Velebitica (Flora of the Velebit Mountains) I–IV., 1936–1938