This is not a book about cycads; it is a book about people—the 57 men and women who, in our opinion, have been most influential in the sphere of cycad biology. These are people of past years whose work we acknowledge with gratitude; without them, our appreciation and understanding of cycads would be woefully inadequate. They are as diverse as the plants they studied: they are from the seventeenth through to the twenty-first centuries, they are of many different nationalities, they speak numerous languages, they have varying beliefs, and they often have opposing political viewpoints. But they have all made a significant contribution to our fundamental knowledge of the living cycads. For that, we owe them. We have arranged the sequence of chapters in a chronological sequence to reflect periods of activity and within each alphabetically by surname.