Antoine Laurent de Jussieu was a French botanist who lived from 1748 to 1836. He was the first to publish a natural classification of flowering plants. His classification was based on an extended unpublished work by his uncle, the botanist Bernard de Jussieu.Jussieu piublished his ideas in Genera plantarum in 1789. He used multiple characters to define groups, an idea derived from naturalist Michel Adanson. This was a significant improvement over the system of Linnaeus, who classified plants based on the number of stamens and pistils.
Jussieu did keep Linnaeus' binomial nomenclature, resulting in a work that was far-reaching in its impact, Many of the present-day plant families are still attributed to Jussieu. Morton's 1981 History of botanical science counts 76 of Jussieu's families conserved in the ICBN, versus just 11 for Linnaeus, for instance.