Carl Wilhelm Correns

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Carl Wilhelm Correns (born May 19, 1893 in Tübingen ; † August 29, 1980 in Göttingen ) was a German mineralogist and geochemist .

Life

CW Correns was born in Tübingen as the son of the biologist Carl Correns . He was the older brother of the chemist and politician Erich Correns and the grandson of the painter Erich Correns . From 1912 he studied geology and mineralogy at the universities of Tübingen and Münster. After the First World War he finished his studies in 1920 with a doctorate in Berlin. In 1921 he married Agnes Ballowitz, a granddaughter of Hugo Pernice . The marriage had two children.

From 1923 to 1927 he was at the Prussian State Geological Institute . In 1926/27 he took part in the German Atlantic Expedition on board the research vessel Meteor , which collected deep-sea sediments in the South Atlantic. From 1927 he worked, initially as an associate professor, from 1930 as a full professor, on the establishment of a geological-mineralogical institute at the University of Rostock . There he used new methods, including X-ray diffraction , to work on the sediments of the meteor expedition. In recognition of this pioneering work, the University of Göttingen appointed him to a new chair for sediment petrography in 1938 , and in 1942 he also became director of the Mineralogical-Petrographic Institute in Göttingen. He turned down a call to the Max Planck Institute for Silicate Research in Würzburg in 1951.

He is considered a pioneer of clay mineralogy in Germany and undertook fundamental experiments to study the chemical processes involved in weathering processes.

After the Second World War, Correns turned increasingly to geochemistry in order to continue the work of his friend and colleague Victor Moritz Goldschmidt , who died in 1947 and who had been expelled from Göttingen , and investigated the geochemical distribution of the elements , such as fluorine , chlorine , Sulfur , carbon , nitrogen , bromine , boron , titanium , tin , lead , and zirconium . He also campaigned for the new field of isotope geochemistry and founded the “Central Laboratory for the Geochemistry of Stable Isotopes” in Göttingen in 1959.

In addition to many scientific publications, he wrote two important textbooks, the Introduction to Mineralogy (1949, second edition 1968, also translated into English and French) and, together with T. Barth and P. Eskola, The Origin of Rocks (1939). He was also the editor of scientific journals: Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (which he co-founded) and Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology .

Honors

In 1940 Correns was elected a full member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and a member of the Leopoldina Academic Academy . In 1976 he received the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America , of which he became an honorary member. He was also an honorary member of the Geological Society of America and an honorary doctorate in Clausthal and Tübingen .

A newly discovered mineral described by Friedrich Lippmann (1928–1998) in 1954 was named corrensite in his honor .

Works

  • Carl Wilhelm Correns: Introduction to Mineralogy (Crystallography and Petrology). Springer, Berlin 1949, 2nd edition 1968 (with Josef Zemann, Sigmund Koritnig)
  • Thomas FW Barth , CW Correns, Pentti Eskola : Formation of rocks. A textbook on petrogenesis. Springer, Berlin 1939.

literature

  • J. Hoefs: Memorial of Carl Wilhelm Correns. In: American Mineralogist 67/1982, p. 399, pdf

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ For example About the components of the clays , Journal of the German Geological Society, Volume 85, 1933, pp. 706-712
  2. ^ Correns The chemical weathering of silicates , Natural Sciences, Volume 28, 1940, pp. 369-375
  3. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 61.
  4. ^ Mineral Atlas: Corrensite
  5. ^ Corrensite , in: John W. Anthony, Richard A. Bideaux, Kenneth W. Bladh, Monte C. Nichols (eds.): Handbook of Mineralogy, Mineralogical Society of America , 2001 ( PDF 75 kB )
personal data
SURNAME Correns, Carl Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mineralogist and geochemist
DATE OF BIRTH May 19, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Tübingen
DATE OF DEATH August 29, 1980
Place of death Goettingen