Aristides Brezina
The Vienna curator whose detailed classification of meteorites was used around the world for more than half a century.
Key facts
- Born
- 1848
- Died
- 1909
- Nationality
- Austrian
- Field
- Mineralogist and curator
Aristides Brezina studied mineralogy and crystallography in Vienna and in 1878 became keeper of the meteorite collection at the imperial natural history museum, which had been built up by Carl von Schreibers decades before.
Brezina expanded the collection greatly, buying and exchanging meteorites from all over the world, until it was one of the largest anywhere. He also refined the classification begun by Gustav Rose and extended by his Vienna colleague Gustav Tschermak, describing dozens of subgroups of stones and irons. This scheme, often called the Rose–Tschermak–Brezina system, was the standard way of describing meteorites until the middle of the twentieth century.
His work on iron meteorites was particularly careful. He studied how the width of the kamacite bands in the Widmanstätten pattern varied, and sorted octahedrites into coarse, medium and fine kinds, terms still used today. He also described the patterns in meteorites in exact crystallographic terms.
Brezina left the museum in 1896 but continued to deal in meteorites and to study them. The mineral brezinaite, a chromium sulphide first found in an iron meteorite, is named in his honour.