Warren H. Wagner Jr. (August 29, 1920 – January 8, 2000), known as Herb Wagner, from his middle name, "Herbert," was an eminent American botanist who lived in Michigan. A longtime faculty member at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), he developed, in the early 1960s, the first algorithm for discerning phylogenetic relationships among species based upon their respective character states observed over a set of characters. This work was honored by James Farris and Arnold Kluge in their later appellation of related algorithms as "Wagner parsimony."
Wagner specialized in the ferns, especially the Botrychiaceae.
Apparently among modern phylogenetic systematists, Wagner is alone in having been mentioned in a Hollywood film (A New Leaf, starring Elaine May and Walter Matthau).
Note: not to be confused with the American botanist Warren L. Wagner (1950- ).
The standard author abbreviation W.H.Wagner is used to indicate this individual as the author when citing a botanical name.Famous quotes containing the words warren and/or wagner:
“It is difficult to believe that even idiots ever succumbed to such transparent contradictions, to such gaudy processions of mere counter-words, to so vast and obvious a nonsensicality ... sentence after sentence that has no apparent meaning at all—stuff quite as bad as the worst bosh of Warren Gamaliel Harding.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“I have witnessed, and greatly enjoyed, the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)