From Gems to Glossary: Fourteen Mineralogists in Order of Birth Year

Start with a Flemish physician who served Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. His 1609 book Gemmarum et Lapidum Historia covered the properties of gems, ways to detect counterfeits and techniques such as diamond splitting, which helped make the study of gems and minerals a systematic field.

A French priest turned crystal into a subject of geometry. His four volume Traité de Minéralogie of 1801 helped earn him the title father of modern crystallography, and during the French Revolution he also helped establish the metric system.

Born in 1773 in Gernrode, Mohs gave mineralogy its best known field test, a ten point scale ranking minerals by their ability to scratch one another. He also classified crystal forms into crystal systems, a scheme developed independently of the parallel one proposed by Christian Samuel Weiss.

This Welsh mineralogist, born in 1801 in Llandovery, gave crystal faces a notation. His 1839 Treatise on Crystallography introduced the Miller indices still used to describe the orientation of crystal faces and planes, and the mineral millerite was later named in his honor.

Dana, born in 1813, was an American geologist, mineralogist, volcanologist and zoologist. His research into mountain formation, volcanic phenomena and the development of continents and ocean basins placed him among the leading American earth scientists of the nineteenth century.

Born in 1836 in Litovel, Moravia, Tschermak directed the Imperial Mineralogical Cabinet in Vienna from 1868 to 1877 and later taught petrography at the University of Vienna. He is known for his work on the classification of meteorites.

A French mineralogist and geologist born in 1863 in Mâcon, Lacroix won the Wollaston Medal in 1917, the Hayden Memorial Geological Award in 1923 and the Penrose Medal in 1930, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Also born in 1863, in Saint Petersburg, Vernadsky is considered a founder of geochemistry, biogeochemistry and radiogeology. His 1926 book The Biosphere argued that living matter is itself a geological force shaping Earth's crust, atmosphere and hydrosphere.

Palache, born in 1869, directed the Mineralogical Museum and Laboratory at Harvard and described mineral occurrences in New England and the western United States. His most lasting contribution was co-producing the seventh edition of Dana System of Mineralogy, published in 1944.

Fersman, born in 1883 in Saint Petersburg, was a student of Vladimir Vernadsky and became director of the Mineralogical Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He received the Wollaston Medal in 1943 and is remembered as a leading popularizer of mineralogy.

Bowen, born in 1887, was a Canadian geologist who revolutionized experimental petrology. Students are still introduced to Bowen's reaction series, which depicts how different minerals crystallize from magma under varying pressure and temperature.

Goldschmidt, born in January 1888, was a Norwegian mineralogist considered the founder of modern geochemistry and crystal chemistry. He developed the Goldschmidt classification of elements.

Born in June 1888 in Zofingen, Niggli was a Swiss leader in X-ray crystallography. In 1935 he and his doctoral student Werner Nowacki determined the seventy three three dimensional arithmetic crystal classes, and the Niggli reduction of a unit cell is named for him.

Finish with the editor who gave minerals their names. Fleischer, born in 1908, worked at the United States Geological Survey from 1939 to 1978, managed the New Mineral Names column of American Mineralogist for more than forty years, and wrote the Glossary of Mineral Species, first published in 1971.