Nikolai Wassiljewitsch Below

Nikolai Vasilyevich Belov ( Russian Николай Васильевич Белов * 2 ^{. Jul} / 14. December  1891 ^greg. In Janow Lubelski , Russian Poland , † 6. March 1982 in Moscow ) was a Russian geochemist , mineralogist and crystallographer .

Life

Below was the son of a district doctor, grew up in Ovrutsch and went to a Russian high school in Warsaw . After graduating from high school in 1910 (where he received a gold medal) he studied metallurgy and natural sciences at the Polytechnic Institute in Petrograd (among other things he also heard from the physicist Abram Fyodorowitsch Joffe ) and received his doctorate in electrochemistry in 1921 under Vladimir Alexandrowitsch Kistjakowski . He married while still a student and lived during the revolutionary turmoil from 1917 to 1921 in his hometown Ovrutsch, where he built bridges, among other things. He then worked as its head in the central chemistry laboratory of the Leningrad tannery and leather industry, but also published popular scientific articles in the journal Priroda, of which he was deputy editor-in-chief under Alexander Evgenyevich Fersman . Fersman was his old teacher of mineralogy and petrography in Leningrad, who inspired him to write his own mineralogical publications.

From 1929 he headed the Institute for Studies of the North (Arctic and Antarctic) and in 1933 he was at the Lomonossow Institute for Geochemistry, Mineralogy and Crystallography of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. One of his main interests was nepheline and apatite deposits on the Kola Peninsula and he recommended the use of nepheline in the tannery and paper and wood industries. There he translated and edited the textbook Kristallchemie by Odd Hassel (1936), which at that time became a standard textbook in Russia, and other crystallographic and crystal chemistry articles. In 1934 he moved from Leningrad to Moscow as part of the general relocation of institutes of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and at the invitation of Alexei Wassiljewitsch Schubnikow .

In 1943 he completed his habilitation (Russian doctorate). In 1946 he became professor of crystallography in Gorky, but commuted constantly between Moscow and Gorky. In 1953 he became professor and head of the crystallography and crystal chemistry department at Lomonosov University .

plant

In the 1930s he developed crystal chemical models based on the assumption of the closest packing of spheres , showing that only eight of the 230 space groups could be considered as symmetries for them (after Linus Pauling had shown that in principle there are infinite possibilities in three dimensions for the closest packing of spheres exist). He published his results in 1947 in the monograph The Structure of Ionic Crystals and Metallic Phases , which was also his habilitation ( called the Blue Book in Russia by specialists in his field ). In 1951, in Structural Crystallography , he gave a simplified derivation of the 230 space groups according to what he called the class method .

He also dealt (independently of Heinrich Heesch ) with black and white symmetry groups (called by him Schubnikow groups) and colored symmetry groups that build on the space groups.

From 1953 he dealt with his students with the crystal chemistry of silicates with large cations (after William Lawrence Bragg had already developed an exhaustive theory for small cations with his students). He presented the results in his monograph Essays in Structural Crystallography in 1976.

Honors and memberships

In 1946 he became a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences . In 1952 he received the State First Class Prize and in 1947 the first Fedorov Prize. In 1974 he received the Lenin Prize , in 1969 he was a Hero of Socialist Labor and in 1965 he received the Lomonosov gold medal . He received a total of three orders of Lenin. 1966 to 1969 he was President of the International Union of Crystallographers . He has been an honorary member of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland since 1971 and also an honorary member of the US and French mineralogical societies and the GDR geological society. He was a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and an honorary doctorate from the University of Wrocław.

The minerals Belovit- (Ce) and Belovit- (La) are named after him.

Fonts

He published over 500 scientific papers.

• The structure of ionic crystals and metallic phases, Moscow 1951 (Russian)
• Structural crystallography, Moscow 1951 (Russian)
• Essays on Structural Mineralogy, Moscow 1976 (Russian)
• Memories from Below are in Paul Peter Ewald (Editor) Fifty Years of X-ray Diffraction , Utrecht, 1962, pp. 520-521.

literature

• Shafranovsky in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography , Online
• Obituary by Paul B. Moore, American Mineralogist 1984, pdf

Individual evidence

1. ↑ John W. Anthony, Richard A. Bideaux, Kenneth W. Bladh, Monte C. Nichols: Belovite- (Ce) , in: Handbook of Mineralogy, Mineralogical Society of America , 2001 ( PDF 63.6 kB )