Howard Everest Hinton (24 August 1912 – 2 August 1977) was a British entomologist and professor who studied beetles.
Education and early life
Howard Hinton grew up in Mexico and attended Modesto Junior College and the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1939 for research on Mexican water beetles. During World War II he worked on the problem of storage of food products to counter the depredation of moths and beetles.
Career
After his PhD, Hinton worked at the Natural History Museum, London. In 1949, he moved to the University of Bristol where he spent the rest of his career.
Hinton published more than 300 scientific papers, many of which were concerned with insect morphology and taxonomy. He founded and edited the Journal of Insect Physiology. He introduced an extra stage in the metamorphosis of insects, the pharate stage, in which the insect has produced a new exoskeleton in preparation for ecdysis but is still enclosed in the remnants of the old one. Geoffrey Hinton, a Turing and Nobel laureate who is a University Professor Emeritus of the University of Toronto; and Teresa, who is a social policy researcher in Tasmania.
Howard's 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, Geohintonia, that are named after him.
Howard Hinton was a great-grandson of George Boole, the founder of mathematical logic. His cousins include Joan Hinton, one of the few women scientists at Los Alamos who later moved to Beijing, and William Hinton who wrote Fanshen, a book about the Chinese Communist Revolution which he observed firsthand while working for the United Nations in China 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.