Born in 1940, Henning Hopf is Director of the Institute for Organic Chemistry at the TU Braunschweig. After studying chemistry in Goettingen and at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he gained his doctorate 1967, he qualified as a professor in 1972 at the University of Karlsruhe. Three years later he was offered a chair at the University of Wuerzburg and from there followed an offer of a professorship at Braunschweig in 1979. His main areas of research concern hydrocarbon chemistry (alkines, allenes, cumulenes, aromats, cyclophanes, polyolefines, etc.) and mechanistic investigations...