Helmut GF Winkler

Helmut Gustav Franz Winkler (born April 3, 1915 in Kiel , † November 10, 1980 in Göttingen ) was a German mineralogist and university professor in Göttingen and Marburg . He is considered to be one of the founders of experimental petrology in Germany and wrote a textbook on metamorphic petrology , which was considered a standard work for a long time and had five editions in German and English as well as translations into French , Spanish , Portuguese and Russian .

Life

Winkler studied mineralogy , geology and chemistry at the University of Rostock , among others, Carl Wilhelm Correns , in which he in 1938 with a thesis on the thixotropy of mineral powders doctorate . He then did his military service and took part in the Second World War until 1944 , before he was able to work again in Rostock as a research assistant at the instigation of his former teacher. He gained international renown through his work , which in 1948 earned him an invitation to spend a year as a visiting scholar in Leeds . After his return, he became in 1949 Director of the newly established Crystallographic Institute in Göttingen and in 1951 he received calls in three different professors, of which he was appointed to the chair at the Mineralogical Institute in Marburg. In 1962 he returned to Göttingen as the successor to Correns, where he taught until his retirement in 1976.

Research work

During his time in Rostock, Winkler mainly dealt with the structure and physical properties of crystals . His first book Structure and Properties of Crystals was published in 1950. He continued this work in Marburg, but increasingly devoted himself to the investigation of clay minerals and their possible uses in the ceramic industry. During a visit to the USA , he got to know newly developed high-pressure apparatus, whose potential for research into minerals and their reactions in metamorphic rocks at different pressures and temperatures he recognized. He devoted himself to this topic in the following years and thus founded a new branch of an experimentally designed petrology. His experiments provided evidence that granites and related rocks develop as melts from metamorphic parent rocks under conditions of high-grade metamorphism, with which he was able to answer the question of why granites are so common in ancient cratons .

Honors

• Honorary membership of the Geological Society of America
• 1966 membership in the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen
• In 1977 Winkler was awarded the Abraham Gottlob Werner Medal by the German Mineralogical Society . In the same year he also received the Hans Stille Medal from the German Geological Society
• a mineral newly discovered in 1979 is named Helmutwinklerite in his honor .

Works (selection)

• Petrogenesis of Metamorphic Rocks . 5th edition, 348 pages, Springer-Verlag , New York, Heidelberg, Berlin, 1979. ISBN 3-540-90413-1
• Lots of basalt and little gabbro - little rhyolite and a lot of granite . Contribution mineral. Petr. 8, 222-231 (1962)
• Structure and Properties of Crystals: An Introduction to Geometric, Chemical, and Physical Crystal Studies . 2nd edition, 314 pages, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg, 1955.

literature

• Karl-Heinz Nitsch: Memorial Helmut GF Winkler, April 3, 1915 – November 10, 1980. American Mineralogist 67, pp. 410–412, 1982 (English; PDF; 325 kB), accessed on August 31, 2011

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 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. 261.
2. ↑ Handbook of Mineralogy - Helmutwinklerite (English, PDF 66.9 kB)

Web links

• Literature by and about Helmut GF Winkler in the catalog of the German National Library