George Evelyn Hutchinson ForMemRS (January 30, 1903 – May 17, 1991) was a British ecologist sometimes described as the "father of modern ecology.

"[2] He contributed for more than sixty years to the fields of limnology, systems ecology, radiation ecology, entomology, genetics, biogeochemistry, a mathematical theory of population growth, art history, philosophy, religion, and anthropology.

[5] Although born in England, he spent nearly his entire professional life at Yale University in the United States where he was Sterling Professor of Zoology and focused on working with graduate students.

By the age of five, Hutchinson was already collecting aquatic creatures and studying their preferred living environment in aquariums that he manufactured himself.

[6] Gresham's was unique in not focusing on the classics, but including more intensive studies of mathematics and science, along with modern languages and history.

[10] Hutchinson was admitted to read zoology at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, graduating in 1925.

Hutchinson's third marriage occurred while he was into his eighties to Anne Twitty, a biologist of Haitian descent.

Next he travelled to South Africa where he discovered the field of limnology or the study of freshwater systems, on the shallow lakes near Cape Town.

He travelled widely, reaching underexplored parts of the world and writing his first book on the ecology of high-elevation lakes in India.

[16] At the age of twenty-two, on graduating from Cambridge, Hutchinson traveled to Italy on a Rockefeller Higher Education Fellowship to work at the Stazione Zoologica.

He lectured for two years before he was fired, but he continued to study the South African water bugs.

[18] While in South Africa in the late 1920s he frequently visited the southeastern portion of the country, in particular conducting biology and chemistry research in Morgans Bay and St Lucia, he also spent a lot of time around the Sani Pass and the Drakensberg Mountains as well as the area around Royal Natal National Park.

This expedition provided the material for his first book, The Clear Mirror, in which he described the colors, organisms, ecology, and the people of the Ladakh.

[22] His postdoctoral associate Raymond Lindeman furthered Hutchinson's model of the trophic dynamic concept.

Hutchinson also raised the idea of climate change 30 years before the problem became popular.

He considered the causes and preventatives for extinction, resource management, and the social anthropology of endangered cultures decades before they were attracting attention as crises.

Hutchinson's death was not only that of a thoughtful man and the growth of a science imprinted by his thinking.

Even more sadly, we may be seeing the end of an intellectual climate in which the sparking mind of one individual can so illuminate a science.

[32] He was elected to the Royal Society in 1983, awarded the Kyoto Prize in 1986, and posthumously the National Medal of Science in 1991.