American botanist. Born in Moline, Illinois, Paul Fryxell graduated from Augustana College in 1949 and received his MSc in 1951 and his PhD in 1955 from Iowa State University. From 1952 to 1955 he worked at the New Mexico Agricultural Experiment Station. He then spent two years at Wichita State University as an assistant professor of botany. In 1957 he joined the US Department of Agriculture as a research botanist based at Texas A & M University. His research is focused on the taxonomy of neotropical Malvaceae, including the cotton genus Gossypium, and has resulted in several major publications, including The Natural History of the Cotton Tribe (1979), The Malvaceae of Mexico (1988), The American Genera of Malvaceae (1997), and a monograph on the genus Pavonia (1999). In 1993 he held a Fulbright Scholarship for study in Argentina. After retiring in 1994, he became adjunct professor in integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a past president of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists and of the Society for Economic Botany, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Texas Academy of Science, a member of the Commission of Flora Neotropica, and an honorary curator of the New York Botanical Garden. Fryxellia D.M. Bates in the Malvaceae is named after him.