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In case you were wondering who Aleksander Fersman was, here is a biography
Fersman, Aleksandr Evgenievich (1883-1945)
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Russian geochemist
Aleksandr Evgenievich Fersman was a Russian geochemist and mineralogist. He made major contributions to Russian geology, both in theory and exploration, advancing scientific understanding of crystallography and the distribution of elements in the earth's crust, as well as founding a popular scientific journal and writing biographical sketches of eminent scientists. He was known as a synthesizer of ideas from different subdisciplines.
Fersman was born in St. Petersburg on November 8, 1883, to a family that valued both art and science. His father, Evgeny Aleksandrovich Fersman, was an architect and his mother, Maria Eduardovna Kessler, a pianist and painter. Fersman's maternal uncle, A. E. Kessler, had studied chemistry under Russian chemist Aleksandr Mikhailovich Butlerov.
At the family's summer estate in the Crimea, Fersman first discovered minerals and began to collect them. When his mother became ill, the family traveled to Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad) in Czechoslovakia. There the young Fersman explored abandoned mines and added to his collection of crystals and druses (crystal-lined rocks).
Fersman graduated from the Odessa Classical Gymnasium in 1901 with a gold medal and entered Novorossisk University. He found the mineralogy course so dull that he decided to study art history instead. He was dissuaded by family friends (the chemist A. I. Gorbov and others) who encouraged him to delve into molecular chemistry. He subsequently studied physical chemistry with B. P. Veynberg, who had been a student of Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev. Veynberg taught Fersman about the properties of crystals.
The Fersman family moved to Moscow in 1903 because Aleksandr's father became commander of the First Moscow Cadet Corps. Fersman transferred to Moscow University, where his interest in the structure of crystals continued. Studying with mineralogist V. I. Vernadsky, he became an expert in goniometry (calculation of angles in crystal) and published seven scientific papers on crystallography and mineralogy as a student. When Fersman graduated in 1907, Vernadsky encouraged him to become a professor.
By 1908, Fersman conducted postgraduate work with Victor Goldschmidt at Heidelberg University in Germany. Goldschmidt sent him on a tour of Western Europe to examine the most interesting examples of natural diamond crystals in the hands of the region's jewelers. This work formed the basis of an important monograph on diamond crystallography Fersman and Goldschmidt published in 1911.
While a student in Heidelberg, Fersman also visited French mineralogist François Lacroix's laboratory in Paris and encountered pegmatites for the first time during a trip to some islands in the Elbe River that were strewn with the rocks. Pegmatites are granitic rocks that often contain rare elements such as uranium, tungsten, and tantalum. Fersman was to devote years to their study later in his career.
In 1912, Fersman returned to Russia, where he began his administrative and teaching career. He became curator of mineralogy at the Russian Academy of Science's Geological Museum. He would be elected to the Academy and become the museum's director in 1919. During this period Fersman also taught geochemistry at Shanyavsky University and helped found Priroda, a popular scientific journal to which he contributed throughout his life.
Fersman participated in an Academy of Science project to catalogue Russia's natural resources starting in 1915, traveling to all of Russia's far-flung regions to assess mineral deposits. After the Russian Revolution, Lenin consulted Fersman for advice on exploiting the country's mineral resources. During World War I Fersman consulted with the military, advising on strategic matters involving geology, as he would also later do in World War II.
In the early 1920s, Fersman devoted himself to one of geochemistry's major theoretical questions regarding the distribution of the chemical elements in the earth's crust. Fersman worked out the percentages for most of the elements and proposed that these quantities be called "clarkes" in honor of Frank W. Clarke, an American chemist who had pioneered their study. Clarkes had traditionally been expressed in terms of weight percentages; Fersman calculated them in terms of atomic percentages. His work showed different reasons for the terrestrial and cosmic distribution of the elements. He was interested in the ways in which elements are combined and redistributed in the earth's crust. He coined the term "technogenesis" for the role of humans in this process, concentrating some elements and dispersing others through extraction and industrial activities.
Over the next twenty years, Fersman was responsible for a reassessment of the U.S.S.R.'s mineral resources. There were many areas, such as Soviet Central Asia and Siberia, which were thought to be resource-poor. Fersman showed otherwise, traveling from the Khibiny Mountains north of the Arctic Circle near Finland to the Karakum Desert north of Iran. He found rich deposits of apatite (a phosphorus-bearing mineral useful in fertilizers) in the former and a lode of elemental sulfur in the latter.
Fersman was acutely aware of the history of his profession and of science in general, passing on to his students his respect for his predecessors, especially Mendeleev and Vernadsky. He wrote many biographical sketches of distinguished scientists and published a number of popular works on mineral collecting. He was active in the Academy of Science of the U.S.S.R., serving in five different administrative posts, and received a number of honors, including the Lenin Prize. He died in the Soviet Georgian city of Sochi on May 20, 1945.
