Background
Weis-Fogh was born in Aarhus and educated at University of Copenhagen.
entomologist university professor
Weis-Fogh was born in Aarhus and educated at University of Copenhagen.
Weis-Fogh was born in Aarhus and educated at.
He is best known for his contributions to the understanding of insect flight, especially the fling and clap mechanism used by very small insects. He pioneered studies of insect flight with Krogh in a classic paper of 1951. He then spent a year at the Copenhagen Institute of Neurophysiology.
He then went to the University of Cambridge in England for four years, where he discovered a rubbery protein, resilin, in insect cuticle.
He continued working on insect flight. He returned to Copenhagen as Professor of Zoophysiology, and then went back to Cambridge in 1966 to become Professor of Zoology there.
In 1973 he devised a mathematical model explaining how extremely small insects such as the thrips or chalcid wasps like Encarsia formosa could fly using clap-and-fling, where conventional steady state aerodynamics did not apply. The British applied mathematician Sir James Lighthill named this mechanism the "Weis-Fogh mechanism of lift generation".
His 1973 paper "Quick Estimates of Flight Fitness in Hovering Animals, Including Novel Mechanisms for Lift Production" has been cited at least 75 times.
