Paul Heinrich von Groth

Paul Heinrich Ritter von Groth, known as Paul Groth, was a German mineralogist and crystallographer born June 23, 1843, in Magdeburg, Germany, who died December 2, 1927, in Munich, Germany, and whose most important contribution was a systematic classification of minerals by their chemical composition and crystal structure; in 1888 he was among the first to propose that spherical atoms occupy equivalent positions within space lattices. He founded the journal Zeitschrift fuer Krystallographie und Mineralogie in 1877 and edited it until 1920, compiled the five-volume Chemische Kristallographie beginning in 1883, and published Tabellarische Uebersicht der einfachen Mineralien between 1874 and 1898 and Physikalische Krystallographie between 1876 and 1905. He held professorships of mineralogy at the University of Strasbourg from 1872 and at Munich, where he also curated minerals at the Deutsches Museum from 1883, was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, was a member of multiple national academies, and received the Wollaston Medal in 1908.