Augustus Quirinus Rivinus

Augustus Quirinus Rivinus (9 December 1652 – 20 December 1723), also known as August Bachmann or A. Q. Bachmann, was a German physician and botanist who helped to develop better ways of classifying plants.

Because of his interest also in astronomy, by the last decade of his life (around 1713), Rivinus was nearly completely blind from looking at sunspots.

In his Introductio generalis in rem herbariam and three books on the plant orders (which comprised but a small part of the whole projected work on a methodical description of plants), Rivinus introduced several important innovations which were later used by other botanists (Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and Carl Linnaeus among them).

[1] Like John Ray he extensively used dichotomous keys which led first to the higher groups, which he called higher genera (genus summum) of plant orders (ordo), and then to the lower genera.

Along with Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Rivinus was the first to apply consistently the rule that the names of all species in a genus should start with the same word (generic name).