Paul Wilhelm Magnus

As a student of Alexander Braun at Berlin, he obtained his PhD in 1870 with a thesis on the aquatic plant genus Najas.

[1][2] From 1871 to 1874, as a botanist aboard the vessel Pomerania, he conducted investigations of algae found in the North and Baltic Seas as well as in the Schlei estuary.

[3] During his career, he analyzed material collected by other botanists, including specimens collected by Joseph Friedrich Nicolaus Bornmüller (Turkey and Syria), Georg Schweinfurth (Eritrea) and Rudolf Marloth (South Africa).

Nearly half of his more than 600 works concerned mycological topics, and he is remembered for his investigations of the parasitic fungi families Ustilaginaceae and Uredinaceae.

He was responsible for "Die Pilze (Fungi) von Tirol, Vorarlberg und Liechtenstein", an 810-page monograph on fungi that was Volume 3 of Dalla Torre and Sarnthein's series on the flora of Tyrol, Vorarlberg and Liechtenstein.