Werner Nowacki

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Werner Nowacki (born March 14, 1909 in Zurich , † March 31, 1988 in Zollikofen ) was a Swiss mineralogist and crystallographer.

Life

Nowacki attended high school in Zurich and studied mathematics (with Andreas Speiser and Heinz Hopf ), physics (with Wolfgang Pauli and Paul Scherrer ) and mineralogy (with Paul Niggli ) at the ETH Zurich from 1927 to 1932 , he also attended lectures by Carl Gustav Jung (psychology) and Heinrich Wölfflin (art history). After graduating in theoretical crystal chemistry, he studied with Victor Moritz Goldschmidt in Göttingen and from 1922 was Niggli's assistant at the Institute for Mineralogy and Petrography at the ETH. In 1935 he received his doctorate in mathematical crystallography at the ETH ( division of space and crystal structure ). He deals with the effective areas of lattice complexes (a term that Niggli had introduced) and extends Niggli's investigation to the spatial case. From 1936 he was senior assistant at the Mineralogical-Petrographic Institute of the University of Bern , where he completed his habilitation and from 1939 was a private lecturer. In 1947 he was at Caltech with Linus Pauling . From 1949 he was associate professor for crystallography and from 1956 full professor at the University of Bern, where he founded the crystallography department. In 1958/59 he was Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Natural Sciences. In 1979 he became retired. In 1986 he suffered a stroke that partially paralyzed him.

In 1948 he generalized and solved the problem of the storage of circles in the plane (solved by Niggli) on ellipses. He found 54 cases.

Nowacki dealt in particular with mathematical crystallography and introduced methods of X-ray structure analysis and spectroscopic examination with the electron microscope (electron microprobe) to crystallography and mineralogy in Switzerland . From 1958 he published numerous publications on the Lengenbach mine in Binntal . A sulfarsenite mineral discovered there was named after him ( Nowackiite ).

In 1980 he became an honorary member of the German Mineralogical Society , in 1975 of the Swiss Crystallographic Society (which he founded and whose first president he was in 1968/69) and in 1969 of the Mineralogical Society of America .

He had been married since 1936 and had two children.

Fonts

  • Modern general mineralogy (crystallography), Vieweg 1951
  • Fourier synthesis of crystals and its application in chemistry; Birkhäuser, 1952
  • with A. Edenharter, T. Matsumoto: Crystal data, systematic tables, American Crystallographic Association, Washington DC, 2nd edition 1967

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Printed by the Leemann brothers, Zurich 1935, 90 pages with 72 figures.
  2. ↑ Nowacki About Elliptical Packings in the Crystal Level , Schweizer Mineralogische und Petrographische Mitteilungen, Volume 28, 1948, pp. 502–508
personal data
SURNAME Nowacki, Werner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss mineralogist and crystallographer
DATE OF BIRTH March 14, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich
DATE OF DEATH March 31, 1988
Place of death Zollikofen