Alexander Karpinsky

Alexander Petrovich Karpinsky, known as Alexander Karpinsky, was a Russian and Soviet geologist and mineralogist born January 7, 1847, in Krasnoturyinsk, then Turyinskiye Rudniki, in Perm Governorate, Russian Empire, who died July 15, 1936, in Moscow, Soviet Union, and who completed the first geological map of European Russia, was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1886, and helped preserve scientific equipment and records during the Russian Revolution. He held a full professorship at the Mining Institute in Saint Petersburg from 1877 to 1885, served as imperial director of mining research from 1885 to 1916, and served as president of the Russian Academy of Sciences and its Soviet successor, the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, from 1917 until his death; he was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow. He received the Hayden Memorial Geological Award in 1897 and the Wollaston Medal in 1916; the Karpinsky Gold Medal was created in 1947 in his honor.