- H. E. Hinton
Professor Howard Everest Hinton, FRS (
24 August 1912 -2 August 1977 ) was a Britishentomologist . He had an encyclopedic knowledge ofinsects and was inordinately fond ofbeetles . He published 309 scientific papers, many of which were concerned with insect morphology andtaxonomy . He founded and edited the Journal of Insect Physiology. He introduced an extra stage in the metamorphosis of insects: Thepharate adult which is an adult waiting to emerge from a cocoon. He was an early proponent ofcontinental drift , based on the close relationship between non-migratory water beetles of the familyelmidae in rivers inNew Guinea and northernAustralia . He worked extensively on insect eggs, particularly the way in which they breathe.Howard Hinton grew up in
Mexico and attended theUniversity of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate. He received his PhD from theUniversity of Cambridge and then worked at theNatural History Museum in London. In 1949, he moved to theUniversity of Bristol where he spent the rest of his life.Howard Hinton married Margaret Clark, a teacher, in 1938 and they had four children, Charlotte who became a headmistress, James who became a Professor of History at the University of Warwick,
Geoffrey Hinton who is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and Teresa who is a social policy researcher in Tasmania. His father, George Hinton, was a mining engineer and botanist who managed a silver mine in Mexico and collected many new botanical specimens, some of which are in Kew gardens. Howard Hinton's nephew, also called George Hinton, has a farm in Mexico and discovered a new genus of cacti that are named after him.Howard Hinton was a great grandson of
George Boole , the founder of mathematical logic. His cousins includeJoan Hinton , one of the few female scientists at Los Alamos who later moved to Beijing, and William Hinton who wrote "Fanshen", a book about the Chinese revolution which he observed firsthand while working for theUN inChina in 1949. His grandfather,Charles Howard Hinton was a mathematician who worked on the concept of four-dimensional space and had to leave Victorian England when he was found guilty of bigamy.He was elected as a Fellow of the
Royal Society on16 March 1961 . His graduate students include Robin Baker andGeoff Parker . His papers are atBristol University , where he worked.References
* Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1978 vol 24 pp 151-182, plate, by
George Salt
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