William Barlow (geologist)

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

Barlow was the son of a wealthy contractor and was financially independent of his life, after he had in 1875 started his inheritance when his father died. He was initially even in his father's construction company operates (the flats in North London built ), but pursued after the commencement of his inheritance scientific interests, especially in mineralogy and crystallography.

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

Barlow took a different, characterized by its geometric intuition access to the classification of space groups as Schönflies and Fyodorov, which were more mathematically oriented.

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.