The Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, is the oldest of the royal academies in Sweden, having been founded in 1710. The society has, by royal decree of 1906, 50 Swedish fellows and 100 foreign.

Anders Celsius was a Swedish astronomer, physicist and mathematician. He was professor of astronomy at Uppsala University from 1730 to 1744, but traveled from 1732 to 1735 visiting notable observatories in Germany, Italy and France. He founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741, and in 1742 proposed the Centigrade temperature scale which was later renamed Celsius in his honour.