Michael Fleischer

Michael Fleischer (born February 27, 1908 in Bridgeport , Connecticut , † September 5, 1998 ) was an American mineralogist and geochemist . He is best known as the editor of the Glossary of Mineral Species .

Life

Fleischer studied chemistry from 1927 (with a minor in mineralogy) at Yale University with a bachelor's degree in 1930 and a doctorate in 1933. He then turned to mineralogy and geochemistry. For two years (1934 to 1936) he supported William Ebenezer Ford as an assistant in the new edition of Dana 's System of Mineralogy . He then worked at the Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, DC From 1939 he worked there as a geochemist with the United States Geological Survey . He retired in 1978 and was a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution in the Mineralogy Department until 1995 .

In 1976 he received the Friedrich Becke Medal and in 1975 the Roebling Medal . He was President of the Mineralogical Society of America (1952) (and its honorary member), the Geochemical Society (1964), Vice President of the Society for Environmental Geochemistry and Health in 1971 and Vice President of the Geological Society of America in 1953 and President of the Geological Society of Washington in 1967 . He was also a member of the Leopoldina since 1974 . 1953 to 1957 he was President of the Commission for Geochemistry of the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry . In 1978 he received the Distinguished Service Medal of the US Department of the Interior . In 1971 he became an honorary member of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland and in 1969 of the French Mineralogical Society.

In the 1940s he published a lot on manganese oxides, including nsutite used as gamma brownstone in batteries . From 1944 to 1947 he headed the US Geological Survey group that searched for mineral resources for the Manhattan Project , mostly recorded in classified reports. He also later published on the geochemistry of lanthanides . The mineral fleischerite is named after him.

From 1941 he had the column New Mineral Names in the American Mineralogist (at that time under the abbreviation MF, he took over the rubric from WF Foshag), with an additional rubric Discredited Minerals . In the period from 1941 to 1960 he only recognized 311 of 583 newly proposed mineral names, while at the same time revoking the name of 224 minerals. In 1959 he was officially commissioned by the then founded International Mineralogical Union to evaluate new names as chairman of the commission responsible for this. He held this office until 1974 and was then Honorary President. He also edited the Glossary of Mineral Species . His successor on the commission was Akira Kato and then Joseph Anthony Mandarino .

In his work he benefited from good reading skills in German, French and Russian, and he translated hundreds of articles from Russian for the US Geological Survey. From 1932 he made contributions to Chemical Abstracts and was editor for their geochemical and mineralogical contributions.

Fonts

• with Ray E. Wilcox, John J. Matzko: Microscopic determination of the non opaque minerals , Washington DC 1984
• (Editor) Data of geochemistry , US Geological Survey, Washington DC 12 volumes, 1962-1979
• with Raymond Parker: Geochemistry of Niobium and Tantalum , Washington DC 1968
• with Robert Sprague Jones: Gold in minerals and the composition of native gold , US Geological Survey, Washington DC 1969
• with Judith W. Frondel, Robert S. Jones: Glossary of uranium and thorium bearing minerals , Washington DC, 4th edition 1967
• with Sam Rosenblum: The distribution of rare-earth elements in minerals of the monazite family , Washington DC 1995
• Glossary of mineral species , Tucson, Arizona, Mineralogical Records, 7th edition 1995 (first 1971, the 1991 and 1995 editions with JA Mandarino)

literature

• Obituary by Brian Mason in: Rocks and Minerals , Volume 74, 1999, p. 126

Web links

• Obituary by Parodi, French