German geographer and geologist, born in Karlsruhe, Upper Silesia, Prussia, now Brzeg, Poland, specializing in geography of the China and whose research was fundamental to the creation of geomorphology, a science that describes the underwater relief and terrestrial. He studied in Breslau, now Wroclaw, Poland, and Berlin, and worked at the Geological Institute in Vienna, where he became known as a geographer for his research in the Dolomite Alps and Transylvania. As a geologist, he was part of a German economic mission in the Far East (1860), when he visited, among other countries, Ceylon, today Sri Lanka, Japan, Java and the Philippines. He lived in California (1863-1868), where he developed a study on the exploration of gold and other minerals.
After further travels through the Orient and spending five years between China and Japan (1868-1872) collecting material, he returned to Germany and he began teaching geology in Bonn (1875) and geography in Leipzig (1883) and Berlin (1886), in addition to dedicating himself to writing new construction. Living to the end of his life in Berlin, he founded the Berlin Institute of Oceanology and, as director of the Berlin Geographical Society, promoted an International Congress of Geography (1899). Some of his most cited publications were China, Ergebnisse eigener Reisen und darauf gegründeter Studien (1877-1912) a five-volume report and an atlas, Aufgaben und Methoden der heutigen Geographie (1883), Führer für Forschungsreisende (1886), in which he laid the foundations of geomorphology, and Treibkräfte und Richtungen der Erdkunde (1903), in addition to the posthumous Tagebücher aus China (1906) and Vorlesingen über allgemeine Siedlungs und Verkehrsgeographie (1908).
Source: http://www.dec.ufcg.edu.br/biografias/
Order F - Biography - Brazil School
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/biografia/ferdinand-paul-wilhelm-richthofen.htm
