Bela Mauritz

* Košice, May 3, 1881 – † Budapest, February 15, 1971 / petrographer, mineralogist, university professor ; ; He studied chemistry and natural history at the University of Budapest as an Eötvös student. In 1902, he was an assistant professor of mineralogy to Professor József Krenner at the Department of Mineralogy and Petrology. After obtaining his teaching certificate, in 1905, he spent five years with the Semsey Andor scholarship at the universities of Heidelberg, Leipzig, Dresden and Vienna to further his knowledge. After returning home, he was again an assistant professor at the University of Budapest until 1910, was habilitated as a private teacher in 1911, and was a public full-time teacher at the Department of Mineralogy and Petrology of the University between 1915 and 1949, and was the rector of the university in 1943–1944. He played a significant role in preventing the relocation of the university to Germany. From 1937 he was the editor of the Mathematical and Natural Sciences Bulletin. He was a member of the Hungarian Geological Society, and then its president for two terms. He was the vice-president of the Natural Sciences Society until 1940. His first papers mainly contained descriptions of minerals, later he was occupied with the petrography of Hungarian deep and outcrop rocks. Examining alkaline rocks, he wrote several studies on the eleolitic syenites of Transylvania. His research was focused on Hungarian, especially Transdanubian basalts. He was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 1913, was reclassified as a consulting member in 1949, and was reinstated by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1989. ; ; His main works: ; The eruptive rocks of the Mátra Mountains, 1909, ; The History of Crystallography (with Sándor Schmidt), 1911, ; The Earth. The World of Nature, 1939, ; Petrology (Petrology), 1941, Mineralogy I–II. (with Aladár Vendl), 1942.