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Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (Владимир Иванович Вернадский) ( – January 6 1945 ) was a Russia n- Ukrainian Mineralogist and Geochemist whose ideas of Noosphere were an important contribution to the Russian Cosmism . He was a founding father of several new disciplines, including Geochemistry , Biogeochemistry , and Radiogeology . BIOGRAPHY Vernadsky graduated from the St Petersburg University in 1885 . As the last minerologist died in 1887 in Russia and Dokuchaev (a soil scientist) and A.P. Pavlov (a geoligist) had been teaching minerology for a while, so Vernadsky chose to enter on the ground floor in Minerology writing his wife Natasha Vernadsky on 20 June 1888 from Switzland (where he was on a trip with Zeitel ): "to collect facts for their own sake, as many now gather facts, withoug a program, without a question to answer or a purpose is not interesting. However, there is a task which someday those chemical ractions which took place at various points on earth; these reactions take place according to laws which are known to us, but which, we are allowed to think, are closely tied to general changes which the earth has undergorne by the earth with the general laws of celestial mechanics. I believe there is hidden here still more to discover when one considers the complexity of chemical eliments and the regularity of their occurrence in groups..." Actually Vernadsky had a pretty rough at first post graduate career while trying to find a topic for his doctorate, he first went to Naples to study with the crystallographer Scacchi , who in early 1888 was senile, leading Vernadsky to go to Germany to study under Paul Groth , where Vernadsky learnt how to use the modern equipment of of Grote who had developed a machine to study optical, thermal, elastic, magnetic and electiral properties of crystals, as well as using the physics lab of Prof. Zonke who too was working on crystalisation. After three weeks there Groth gave Vernadsky a small project with a patner Mutman (who Vernadsky wrote was lazy) to determine the optic qualities of a complex compound. He first popularized the concept of the Noosphere and deepened the idea Biosphere to the meaning largely recognized by today's scientific community. The word biosphere was invented by Austrian Geologist Eduard Suess , whom Vernadsky had met in 1911 . Vernadsky is considered one of the Precursors Of Ecology . In Vernadsky's theory of how the Earth develops, the Noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the earth, after the Geosphere (inanimate matter) and the Biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human Cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. In this theory, the principles of both life and cognition are the essential features of the earth's Evolution , and must have been implicit in the earth all along. This is in contrast to Darwin's theory of Natural Selection , which looks at each individual species, rather than at its relationship to a subsuming principle. Vernadsky was the founder and the first president of the Ukrainian Academy Of Sciences in Kiev , Ukraine ( 1918 ) and worked closely with the Tavrida University in Crimea . During the Russian Civil War , he hosted the gatherings of the young intellectuals who later founded the emigre Eurasianist Movement . One of the main avenues in Moscow and Tavrida National University in Crimea are named after him. Verandsky's son George Vernadsky (1887-1973) emigrated to the United States where he published numerous books on medieval Russian history as well as medieval Ukrainian history and modern Russian history. WORKS (SELECTED)
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