Aristides Brezina was an Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n mineralogist born in Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

. In 1872 he graduated from the University of Tübingen, and afterwards taught crystallography

Crystallography

Crystallography is the experimental science of the arrangement of atoms in solids. The word "crystallography" derives from the Greek words crystallon = cold drop / frozen drop, with its meaning extending to all solids with some degree of transparency, and grapho = write.Before the development of...

 at the University of Vienna

University of Vienna

The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world...

. In 1878 he succeeded Gustav Tschermak

Gustav Tschermak von Seysenegg

Gustav Tschermak von Seysenegg was an Austrian mineralogist.-Biography:He was born 19 April 1836 in Littau, Olomouc District, Moravia and studied at the University of Vienna where he obtained a teaching degree. He studied mineralogy at Heidelberg and Tübingen and obtained a PhD...

 (1836-1927) as custodian of the meteorite

Meteorite

A meteorite is a natural object originating in outer space that survives impact with the Earth's surface. Meteorites can be big or small. Most meteorites derive from small astronomical objects called meteoroids, but they are also sometimes produced by impacts of asteroids...

 collection at Vienna, and from 1889 until 1896 he was director of the Mineralogisch-Petrographische Abteilung (Department of Mineralogy-Petrography

Petrography

Petrography is a branch of petrology that focuses on detailed descriptions of rocks. Someone who studies petrography is called a petrographer. The mineral content and the textural relationships within the rock are described in detail. Petrographic descriptions start with the field notes at the...

).

Brezina is known for his study of meteorites, and with German mineralogist Gustav Rose

Gustav Rose

Gustav Rose was a German mineralogist who was a native of Berlin. He was a brother of mineralogist Heinrich Rose , the son of pharmacologist Valentin Rose , and the father of noted surgeon Edmund Rose and the classicist Valentin Rose.He was a graduate of the University of Berlin, where he was a...

 (1798-1873) and Gustav Tschermak, he was co-architect of the "Rose-Tschermak-Brezina classification" system for meteorites. It was largely based on criteria such as texture and color, and was widely used from the mid-1880s to around 1920 when a simpler method of classification was proposed by G.T. Prior.

The mineral brezinaite which is found in meteorites is named after him.