William Barlow (geologist)

William Barlow (born August 8, 1845 in Islington , London , † February 28, 1934 in Great Stanmore , Middlesex ) was a British crystallographer, geologist and mineralogist.

Barlow was the son of a wealthy building contractor and was financially independent throughout his life after assuming his inheritance on the death of his father in 1875. He initially worked for his father's construction company (who built apartments in North London), but after taking up his inheritance he pursued scientific interests, particularly in mineralogy and crystallography.

In 1894 he published over 230 space groups in crystallography. He found this independently of Arthur Moritz Schönflies and Jewgraf Stepanowitsch Fjodorow , but published it later (Schönflies and Fjodorow found them around 1890). Barlow found his results earlier, too. His first publication was in 1888. He also predicted two types of cubic crystal structure in minerals of the sodium chloride structure type, which was later confirmed by X-ray crystallography (Bragg 1913).

Barlow pursued a different approach, shaped by his geometrical view, to the classification of spatial groups as Schönflies and Fjodorow, which were more mathematically oriented.

From 1915 to 1918 he was President of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland . In 1908 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society . The Dorsa Barlow on Earth's moon are named after him.

literature

• Obituary Notices Fellows Royal Society, WJ Pope, 1935
• Peter Tandy William Barlow (1845-1934): Speculative builder, man of leisure and inspired crystallographer , Proceedings of the Geologists Association, 115, 2004, 77-84, abstract

Web links

• Website about Barlow as a crystallographer

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Barlow on the geometric properties of homogeneous rigid structures and their application to crystals , Zeitschrift für Krystallographie und Mineralogie, Volume 23, 1894, pp. 1-63
2. ↑ Probable nature of internal symmetry of crystals, Nature, 29, 1883, pp. 186-188