Luca Bindi
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- crystal structure solution
- quasicrystals
- twinning in mineral structures
- crystal-chemistry of rock-forming minerals
Luca Bindi | |
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| Born | 2 December 1971 Prato, Italy |
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| Awards | Premio Presidente della Repubblica, 2015[1] |
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| Institutions | University of Florence, Italy |
Luca Bindi (born 1971) is an Italian geologist. He holds the Chair of Mineralogy and Crystallography and is the Head of the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Florence. He is also a research associate at the Istituto di Geoscienze e Georisorse of the National Research Council (Italy) (CNR). He has received national and international scientific awards including the 2015 President of the Republic Prize[1] in the category of Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences. Since 2019 he has been a Member of the National Academy of Lincei.
He is the Italian scientist who has contributed to the description of the highest number of new minerals and is among the top ten researchers in the world for the number of new mineralogical species described.[citation needed] In his career he has described about 2% of the 6,000 minerals known in nature. Most of the new materials were discovered in the collections of the Museum System of the University of Florence, with its approximately fifty thousand specimens. The
Bindi is credited with the co-discovery of the first known natural quasicrystal, having identified a potential candidate from the mineral collection at the University of Florence.[2] The discovery ultimately showed that quasicrystals can form spontaneously in nature and remain stable for geological times.[3]
Awards for his research include:
- Panichi Prize for mineralogical investigations of the Italian Society of Mineralogy and Petrology (2004)[4]
- Nardelli Prize awarded by the Italian Association of Crystallography (2006)[5]
- Excellence Research Medal awarded by the European Mineralogical Union[6]
- Foreign Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the Russian Mineralogical Society (2007)[7]
- Luigi Tartufari Prize for Geology of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (2010)[8]
- Award given by the President of the Republic (2015)[1][9]
- Aspen Institute Italia Award with Paul J. Steinhardt for scientific research and collaboration between Italy and the United States (2018)
- Neumann Medal 2023 of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland
- 2024 Gold Medal for Science of the National Academy of Sciences
Two of his scientific works related to the discovery of the first natural quasicrystal, icosahedrite, were cited in Scientific Background on the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 – The Discovery of Quasicrystals[10] of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
On 2011, the mineral lucabindiite was named in his honor.
On 29 May 2018, the asteroid 92279 Bindiluca was named in his honor.
