Eric Hultén

Oskar Eric Gunnar Hultén (18 March 1894 – 1 February 1981) was a Swedish botanist, plant geographer and 20th century explorer of The Arctic. He was born in Halla in Södermanland. He took his licentiate exam 1931 at Stockholm University and obtained his doctorate degree in botany at Lund University in 1937. In his thesis, he coined the term Beringia for the ice-age land bridge between Eurasia and North America. From 1945 to 1961, he was a professor and head of the Botany Section at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. In 1953, he was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as member number 977.

Hultén travelled extensively in the Scandes Mountains and Siberia, Kamchatka (1920–22 together with his spouse Elsie Hultén, Sten Bergman and René Malaise), the Aleutian Islands and Alaska (1932). He published extensive accounts on the flora of several of these regions and distribution maps of thousands of species.

Hultén edited an exsiccata entitled with G. Samuelsson (+): Plantae Sueciae exsiccatae. Edidit Eric Hultén. It is a series of numbered duplicate specimens collected by the Swedish botanist Gunnar Samuelsson (1885 – 1944) and - after his death - distributed among a number of institutional herbaria.^[1]

He was the father of the professor of art history and art collector Pontus Hultén. Hultén authored several botanical monographies on the Nordic area and from his travels in Siberia and the Aleutian Islands. In 1973, he published his memoirs under the title Men roligt har det varit ("But it's been fun").

Several dozen plant species have been named to his honour, e.g.^[3]

• Ligusticum hultenii, by Merritt Lyndon Fernald
• Salix hultenii, by Björn Floderus