Background

Louis Agassiz was born in Haut-Vully, Switzerland on May 28th, 1807. Originally educated at home, he completed his elementary studies in Lausanne. For his secondary education, he studied at the universities of Heidelberg, Zurich, and Munich. While his primary education was in medicine, he gained much knowledge of natural history through his secondary education. In 1829, he received his PhD at the University of Erlangen-Nuremburg advised by Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius. Soon after, he moved to Paris where he began to delve into the depths of both geology and zoology. In the same city, he became acquainted with Alexander von Humboldt and Georges Cuvier, whose works had a profound influence on him. Down this path of his life, he also encountered ichthyology, a study previously ignored that soon became the focal point of his early work.