Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences or Kungliga Vetenskapsakademin ("KVA") is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. The Academy is an independent, scientific, non-governmental organization, set up to support the sciences, mainly the natural sciences and mathematics.

Royal Swedish Academy of Science

The Academy was started on 2 June 1739 by naturalist Carl Linnaeus, economist Jonas Alströmer, mechanical engineer Mårten Triewald, civil servants Sten Carl Bielke and Carl Wilhelm Cederhielm, and politician Anders Johan von Höpken.

The academy was set up to find useful knowledge, and to write about it in Swedish. The academy was meant to be different from the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, which had been started in 1719 and published in Latin. It was built near the main business centre in Stockholm, (which unlike Uppsala did not have a university at this time). The Swedish scientists wanted it to be like the Royal Society in London and Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris, France.

Groups of the Academy meet to give out international prizes:

• Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry
• Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (also known as the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics)
• Crafoord Prizes in astronomy and mathematics, geosciences, biosciences (with an emphasis on ecology), and polyarthritis (rheumatoid arthritis)
• Rolf Schock Prizes in logic and philosophy
• Gregori Aminoff Prize in crystallography
• Oskar Klein medal

and national prizes:

• Göran Gustafsson Prizes for research in the natural sciences and medicine
• Söderberg Prize in economics or jurisprudence
• Tage Erlander Prize in physics, chemistry, technology, and biology
• Ingvar Lindqvist Prizes for teachers in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Other websites

• The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences