Karl Wilhelm Verhoeff

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Karl (or Carl) Wilhelm Verhoeff (November 25, 1867 – December 6, 1944) was a German zoologist, specialising in millipedes and centipedes (Myriapoda), as well as woodlice (Isopoda) and to a lesser extent insects.

Biography

Karl W. Verhoeff was born on November 25, 1867 in Soest in Westfalia, the son of the apothecary Karl M. Verhoeff and his wife Mathilde (born Rocholl). He completed his Abitur examination in Soest in 1889 and completed his doctoral thesis in zoology in Bonn in 1893. In 1902 he married Marie Kringer, who died in 1937 during surgery. The marriage produced three children, two daughters and a son, the son dying in 1942 on the Russian front.

He was briefly employed (1900–1905) at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, but for the remainder of his long career, he worked privately.[1] Verhoeff undertook a number of collecting trips, including visits to the French Riviera, and Romania and Bulgaria down through Bosnia and into Greece. Some of these trips were financed by the Prussian Academy of Science. He financed himself partly by selling his collections, with Munich and Berlin holding large amounts of his material.

Contemporary taxonomists did not appreciate his early, groundbreaking work on Dermaptera, mainly due to his obscure expression and scarcity of illustrations and explanations, but his achievements in this group – as well as in Diplopoda and Chilognatha – were later recognized.[2]

Verhoeff received a number of awards towards the end of his life, including the silver Leibniz-Medaille of the Prussian Academy of Science (1933), the Preis & Plakette of the August Forel foundation (1942) and a Doktor Diplom from the University of Bonn on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his thesis (1943). In 1942, shortly before his 75th birthday, he was elected to the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Problems with his sight and the destruction of his home in a bombing raid meant that he could no longer carry out research and he committed suicide on December 6, 1944.[1][2]

Taxonomy

Verhoeff was – alongside Ralph Vary Chamberlin and Carl Attems – one of the most prolific authors of myriapod taxa.[3] The 1962 compilation of Gisela Mauermayer records 670 scientific works by Verhoeff, including major contributions to the series Klassen und Ordnungen des Tierreichs.[4]

The standard author abbreviation "Verhoeff" is used to indicate Karl Wilhelm Verhoeff as the author when citing a botanical name.[5]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "The heritage of Karl-Wilhelm Verhoeff". GBIF Deutschland. December 8, 2004. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 M.B.[?] (1946). "Notes". The Entomologist's record and journal of variation 58: 156–157. 
  3. ↑ Petra Sierwald & Jason E. Bond (2007). "Current status of the myriapod class Diplopoda (millipedes): taxonomic diversity and phylogeny". Annual Review of Entomology 52 (1): 401–420. doi:10.1146/annurev.ento.52.111805.090210. PMID 17163800. 
  4. ↑ Gisela Mauermayer (1962). "Karl Wilhelm Verhoeff 1867–1945. Selbstdarstellung eines deutschen Zoologen mit einem Verzeichnis seiner Veröffentlichungen" [Karl Wilhelm Verhoeff 1867–1945. Self portrait of a German zoologist, with a list of his publications]. Lebensdarstellungen deutscher Naturforscher 9: 9–50. 
  5. ↑ "Verhoeff, Carl(Karl) Wilhelm (1867–1944)". Author Details. International Plant Names Index. Retrieved November 9, 2010. 
Authority control
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.