23 Facts About Willi Hennig

Emil Hans Willi Hennig was a German biologist and zoologist who is considered the founder of phylogenetic systematics, otherwise known as cladistics.

In 1945 as a prisoner of war, Hennig began work on his theory of cladistics, which he published in German in 1950, with a substantially revised English translation published in 1966.

Willi Hennig is remembered for Hennig's progression rule in cladistics, which argues controversially that the most primitive species are found in the earliest, central part of a group's area.

Willi Hennig's father Karl Ernst Emil Hennig was a rail worker.

Rudolf Willi Hennig described the family as calm; his father possessed an even temperament.

In 1930, Willi Hennig skipped a year, and graduated on 26 February 1932.

Besides school, Willi Hennig worked as a volunteer at the museum and, in collaboration with Meise, saw to the systematic and biogeographical investigation of the "flying" snakes of the genus Dendrophis that became his first published work.

Willi Hennig would continue to visit the Museum in Dresden.

Willi Hennig saw him regularly until van Emden was expelled from National Socialist Germany for having a Jewish mother and wife.

Willi Hennig developed a deep friendship with Emden's successor, Klaus Gunther.

On 13 May 1939, Willi Hennig married his former fellow student Irma Wehnert.

Willi Hennig was drafted in 1938 to train for the infantry and concluded this course in 1939.

Willi Hennig was injured by grenade shrapnel in 1942 and was used as entomologist at the Institute for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in Berlin, carrying the rank of a Sonderfuhrer.

Willi Hennig did believe that Nazi Germany would win World War II.

From 1 December 1945, to 31 March 1947, Willi Hennig stood in for his thesis supervisor Paul Buchner as assistant to Professor Friedrich Hempelmann at the University of Leipzig, giving lectures in general biology, zoology and special zoology of insects.

Willi Hennig returned to the German Entomological Institute in Berlin on 1 April 1947, and gave up his position in Leipzig.

Willi Hennig continued working at the German Entomological Institute in the Soviet Sector of Berlin, Berlin-Friedrichshagen, all the while living in the American sector in Berlin-Steglitz.

In West Berlin, Willi Hennig was given an interim post at the Technische Universitat Berlin as Distinguished Professor.

Willi Hennig rejected offers from the US Department of Agriculture in Washington, DC, and an offer made by his friend Elmo Hardy, to become a Research Fellow at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, citing as reasons that the education of his sons took priority for him, and that he needed to have the "cultural witnesses of the antique Greek-Roman Europe within ready access".

Willi Hennig instead decided on a post at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, where he was given a department for phylogenetic research.

Willi Hennig only visited international institutions abroad twice, in spite of receiving many invitations for guest lectures.

Willi Hennig's stay in Canada was used for visits to various entomological collections in museums of the US, including Cambridge, Chicago, Washington, DC, and New York, always in the hope of finding further amber inclusions of Dipterans, that featured prominently in his research of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Willi Hennig had previously repeatedly cancelled lectures with reference to his fading health, and had already had an attack on his journey to Ottawa.