Victor Mordechai Goldschmidt


Victor Mordechai Goldschmidt was a German mineralogist, natural philosopher, and art collector.

Life

Born 1853 in Mainz, Goldschmidt attended the Bergakademie Freiberg in Saxony and graduated in engineering in 1874. He received his doctorate in 1880 in Heidelberg for his work on mechanical rock analysis and continued his studies in Vienna from 1882 to 1887. In 1888 he wrote his habilitation about "Projektion und graphische Krystallberechnung" under the same supervisor as his doctoral dissertation. He founded the Institut für Mineralogie und Kristallographie in Heidelberg in association with the Josefine and Eduard von Portheim Stiftung, which he founded in memory of his maternal ancestors. In 1893, he became an adjunct professor at the University of Heidelberg and in 1913, he was awarded membership in the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. During his time on the faculty at Heidelberg, one of his famous students was the American volcanologist Thomas Jaggar.
His Atlas der Krystallformen developed from 1913 until 1923. Around this time, in 1917, he was made a geheimer Hofrat. In 1923, he was made an honorary member of the Naturhistorisch-Medizinischen Verein Heidelberg. In 1919, he donated his and his wife's extensive collection of art and ethnographic artefacts to the state of Baden as the Josephine and Eduard von Portheim-Stiftung. In 1933, the curatorium of the "v. Portheim-Stiftung" gave its mineralogical-crystallographical institute the name Victor-Goldschmidt-Institut für Kristallforschung.
The Goldschmidts of Frankfurt, contributed significantly to the founding of the Goethe University Frankfurt.

Works