Fritz Laves

Fritz Laves ( born February 27, 1906 in Hannover, † August 12 1978 in Laigueglia in Alassio, Italy ) was a German mineralogist and crystallographer.

Life

Fritz Laves was a descendant of Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves. After graduating from high school in 1924 in Göttingen, he studied natural sciences, particularly mineralogy in Innsbruck, Göttingen and Zurich, where he completed a doctorate on " Bauzusammenhänge within the crystal structures ". He moved to the University of Göttingen and his habilitation in 1932.

His research interests were the X-ray structure analysis of crystalline solids and the properties of alloys.

After the seizure of power by the National Socialists, he stood up for his Jewish colleagues Victor Moritz Goldschmidt, but also included on 11 November 1933, the signatories of the commitment of the professors at German universities and colleges to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi state. In 1936, he was youth worker in the National Socialist People's Welfare and entered the Nazi League of German art in the following year. During World War II, he was first a soldier in France, then integrated from 1940 to 1945 in militarily relevant research on light metal alloys. At the same time his college career developed at the University of Halle, where he first moved in 1945 to the University of Marburg, then in 1948 at the University of Chicago, and finally from 1954 to 1976 as Professor of Crystallography and Petrography at the ETH and University of Zurich.

Named after him are the intermetallic Laves phases described by him.

In 1931 he determined the 11 homogeneous networks of the plane ( also Laves nets ). It is the tiling of the plane by a finite number of identical or mirror-image polygons, each polygon is surrounded by all the others in the same or mirror images of the same way. The subject was also treated soon after (1933 ) by Heinrich Heesch and independent of Shubnikov.