Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography, while his advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement pioneered modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.

A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society, including how society and nature interacts. The Greek prefix "geo" means "earth" and the Greek suffix, "graphy", meaning "description", so a geographer is someone who studies the earth. The word "geography" is a Middle French word that is believed to have been first used in 1540.