Waldemar Lindgren

Waldemar Lindgren was a Swedish American geologist, born in 1860 in Vassmolosa, Sweden, and died in 1939, regarded as a founder of modern economic geology. After training as a mining engineer at the Freiberg Mining Academy in Germany, he spent thirty one years with the United States Geological Survey studying ore deposits of the Rocky Mountains, developing an influential classification of how ore bodies form through igneous and metasomatic processes that he set out in his 1913 book Mineral Deposits. In 1905 he helped found the journal Economic Geology, and in 1912 he became head of the geology department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.