Louis Agassiz

Agassiz, Louis (Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz; 1807–73), Swiss-American naturalist, geologist, and educator who first proposed (1840) that large areas of the northern continents had been covered by ice sheets in the geologically recent past. He is also noted for his studies of fishes. He became a professor of zoology and geology at Harvard in 1848, where he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1859.