Jonathan Deininger Sauer (July 16, 1918 Ann Arbor, Michigan – May 25, 2008, Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles) was a botanist and plant geographer. Jonathan D. Sauer, whose father was Carl O. Sauer, graduated in 1939 from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in history. He then entered the graduate program in geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His academic career was interrupted by WW II when he was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Forces. He was stationed at the Pentagon, where he worked as a weather specialist. He married in 1946 and became a graduate student in botany, studying under Edgar Anderson at Washington University in St. Louis. Sauer graduated there in 1950 with a Ph.D. dissertation on the grain amaranths. In 1950 he returned to the University of Wiscons