Ole Worm

Ole Worm (13 May 1588 – 31 August 1654), who often went by the Latinized form of his name Olaus Wormius, was a Danish physician, natural historian and antiquary.

Fincke was a Danish mathematician and physicist, who invented the terms 'tangent' and 'secant' and taught at the University of Copenhagen for more than 60 years.

[3] Through Fincke, Worm became connected to the powerful Bartholin family of physicians, and later theologians and scientists, that dominated the University of Copenhagen throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.

[4] Ole Worm was something of a perpetual student: after attending the grammar school of Aarhus, he continued his education at the University of Marburg, studying theology in 1605.

The rest of his academic career was spent in Copenhagen, where he taught Latin, Greek, physics, and medicine.

[10] Other empirical investigations he conducted included providing convincing evidence that lemmings were rodents and not, as some thought, spontaneously generated by the air (Worm 1655, p. 327), and also by providing the first detailed drawing of a bird-of-paradise proving that they did, despite much popular speculation to the opposite, indeed have feet like regular birds.

[12] Worm compiled engravings of his collection, along with his speculations about their meaning, into a catalog of his Museum Wormianum, published after his death in 1654.

Ole Worm and Dorothea Worm, née Fincke