Hugo Strunz (* 1910)

Karl Hugo Strunz was born in Weiden on 24 February 1910. He attended several schools in Regensburg. While there, he joined the Natural Sciences Society. In 1929 he started studying science in Munich, specialising in mineralogy. By 1933 he earned a PhD at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität and two years later became a doctor of science and technology at the TH Munich. Meanwhile he had completed two grades of exams to become a lecturer in science, but he did not take up a post in education. He won a research scholarship to the institute of William Lawrence Bragg (1890-1971) in Manchester, England and then he worked as an assistant to Paul Niggli (1888-1953) at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1937 he became assistant to Paul Ramdohr (1890-1985) at the Mineralogisches Museum in Berlin. He gained the grade of professor in 1938 and found a post as teacher of mineralogy and petrography at the Friedrich Wilhelm Universität in Berlin in 1939. After World War II, Strunz returned to his native Bavaria in southern Germany and took a contract to teach mineralogy at the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule in Regensburg, where he set up a Mineralogisch-Geologisches Institut, which later was expanded to become the Staatliches Forschungsinstitut für angewandte Mineralogie (State Research Institute for Mineralogy). In 1951 Strunz came to the TU Berlin to become professor of mineralogy und petrography, which he said was the best professorship in Germany at the time. In the difficult postwar period he built up a fully-functioning and constantly-expanding institute in the space of a few years, which produced more than 140 publications (out of a total of 220) in the 27 years that he worked there. He returned to Bavaria after becoming professor emeritus.

As curator of the Mineralogical Museum, Strunz was charged with rearranging the collection according to a classification system based on crystal-chemical principles. His "Mineralogische Tabellen" (Mineralogical Tables), which was first published in 1941 and has been reissued many times and translated into many languages, is now regarded as a standard work. As a consequence, the Internationale Zentralstelle für Mineraldatensammlung (International Centre for Mineral Data Collection) is located at Strunz's institute. From 1958 to 1970 he headed the Mineral Data Commission of the International Mineralogical Association and he has been an associate director there since 1982. As a co-author of the mineralogy textbook "Klockmanns Lehrbuch der Mineralogie" he has influenced the education of several generations of students. Strunz has also demonstrated an interest in the history of his subject. He has published many articles on the theme and in 1970 he published a history of the 200 years of the mining academy of the TU Berlin, "Von der Bergakademie zur Technischen Universität Berlin 1770-1970".

On his numerous journeys to nearly all the world's continents he has discovered a large number of new minerals. He has devoted special attention to the mineralogical and geological particularities of his native Oberpfalz region in Bavaria. From this area comes a manganese-iron-phosphate, first described in 1957, which was named strunzite in his honour. Ferrostrunzite also bears his name.

Strunz has been awarded with many honours. He is a member of numerous academies and is on the boards of many national and international societies. In 1985 the West German state admitted him to the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic (first class).

Lit.: Werner Lieber: Hugo Strunz zum 90. Geburtstag am 24. Februar 2000, in: Lapis 25 (2000) Heft 2, p. 5-6; TU-Archive.

[M. E.]