Aristides Brezina

Aristides Brezina ( born May 4, 1848 in Vienna, † May 25, 1909 ) was an Austrian mineralogist.

Life

Brezina was the son of a lawyer. He was interested in as a teenager for minerals and was a volunteer at the Imperial Hofmineralien Cabinet and heard during his high school years lecturing at the University of Vienna ( Gustav Tschermak, Eduard Suess, Albrecht Schrauf ). After graduation in 1866, he studied mathematics, physics and chemistry at the University of Vienna, Berlin and Tübingen, where he was born in 1872 received his doctorate. As early as 1868 he became an assistant at k.k. Hofmineralien Cabinet. In 1874 he habilitated in crystallography and crystal physics in Vienna and is curator of the Hofmineralien Cabinet. In 1878 he takes over the management of the meteorite collection as successor to Gustav Tschermak. He heads the relocation of the museum collections of the Imperial Palace to the ring road. In 1889 he is director of the mineralogical- petrographic department for the imperial collections. In 1896, he went into retirement. His successor was Friedrich Berwerth.

Brezina dealt in particular with meteorites. The meteorite mineral Brezinait is named after him.

He was an honorary member of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

In 1877 he married the daughter of the architect and Privy Councillor Charles Koechlin.

Writings

• With E. Cohen The structure and composition of meteoric explained by photographic illustrations etched cut surfaces, Schweizerbart, 1886, 1906
• The meteorite collection of the kkNaturhistorischen Court Museum on May 1, 1895 Alfred Hölder, Vienna 1896 ( the catalog lists 497 localities of meteorite finds )