Alexander Fersman

Alexander Evgenyevich Fersman was a Russian and Soviet mineralogist and geochemist, born in 1883 in Saint Petersburg and died in 1945 in Sochi, Soviet Union. A student of Vladimir Vernadsky at Moscow University, he became curator and later director of the Mineralogical Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and his research advanced the study of crystallography and the distribution of chemical elements in Earth's crust. He was awarded the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London in 1943 and is remembered in Russia as a leading popularizer of mineralogy through his biographical and general-audience writing.