Crystallography, mineralogy and petrography in «Notes of the Leningrad mining institute»

Abstract

The "Journal of the Leningrad Mining Institute during the fifty years of its existence occupy a prominent role in the history of the development of Russian mineralogy and crystallography. From the beginning of the foundation of the journal and to the end of his life one of the most active workers of the Notes was the famous professor and director of the Mining Institute, the greatest Russian crystallographer, geometer, petrographer, and mineralogist E. S. S. Kovalov. С. Fedorov (1853-1919). From 1907 to 1917, 144 of his works appeared in the pages of the Notes. Of these, 65 are related to crystallography proper, 4 to mineralogy and 5 to petrography. The remaining articles treat mainly questions of new geometry, intensively developed in those years by the scientist. However, in these seemingly purely geometric works E. S. Fedorov paid special attention to the practical use of his theoretical conclusions in the field of crystallography, mineralogy and mining. Thus, for example, in the article “Precise representation of points of space on the plane” (1907, vol. I, vol. 1, issue 1) various ways of representing points of three-dimensional space on the plane with the help of circles (vectoral and ordinary) and parallel vectors are proposed. In the article “Representation of Crystal Structure by Vectorial Circles” (1908, vol. I, vol. 4), the mentioned methods were successfully applied to represent elementary particles composing spatial crystal structures on the plane. This remarkable method was recalled by A. N. Zavaritsky and demonstrated its efficiency on examples of the image of real crystal structures.