biography
| name: |
Goldschmidt, Victor Moritz
|
pronunciation:
[gohldshmit]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1888–1947)
|
| biography:
| Chemist, the founder of geochemistry, born in Zürich, N Switzerland. He studied at Kristiania (now Oslo) University in 1911, where he became the director of the Mineralogical Institute (1914). In 1929 he moved to Göttingen, but returned six years later when the Nazis came to power. In Norway he was imprisoned by the Germans but escaped, eventually reaching England in 1943. His success was in applying physical chemistry to mineralogy. Using X-ray techniques he worked out the crystal structure of over 200 compounds and 75 elements, and made the first tables of ionic radii. In 1929 he postulated what is now known as Goldschmidt's law - that the structure of a crystal is determined by the ratio of the numbers of ions, the ratio of their sizes, and polarization properties. This work enabled him to predict in which minerals and rocks various elements could be found. |
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