Vocation : Science : Geology

Gustaaf Adolf Frederik Molengraaff (27 February 1860 – 26 March 1942) was a Dutch geologist, biologist and explorer. He became an authority on the geology of South Africa and the Dutch East Indies.
Gustaaf Molengraaff studied mathematics and physics at Leiden University. From 1882 he studied at Utrecht University. As a student he made his first journey overseas when he joined the 1884–1885 expedition to the Dutch Antilles led by Willem Frederik Reinier Suringar and Karl Martin. He became PhD with a thesis on the geology of Sint Eustatius. He studied crystallography in Munich, where he also took the opportunity to study the geology of the Alps nearby.
In 1888 Molengraaff took a job as a teacher at the University of Amsterdam. Before his assignment courses in geology were given by the chemist Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff. During his assignment in Amsterdam, Molengraaff travelled to South Africa to study gold deposits (1891) and to Borneo (1894) where he explored large parts of the inland. Teaching at Amsterdam was not to his liking, because there were too little materials and students available.
In 1897 Molengraaff became "state geologist" of the Transvaal Republic. His task was to start the geological survey of the Transvaal. While mapping the Transvaal he discovered the Bushveld complex. In 1900 he got involved in the Second Boer War and had to return to the Netherlands. This gave him time to write a report on the geology of the Transvaal, and travel to Celebes, where he (again) studied gold deposits.
Due to his reputation as a geologist he could return to South Africa in 1901 to work as a geological consultant. One of his assignments was to describe the newly found Cullinan diamond for the Central Bank of South Africa. Meanwhile the Boer War still had his attention. One of his ideas was to give each soldier a small tin identity card, which later became practice in armies around the world.
In 1906 he became professor at Delft University and this time he got enough resources and students to make his work successful. The same year he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1910-1911 he led a geological expedition to Timor. His research at Delft was mainly on the material collected during that expedition, and on the geology of the Netherlands. In 1922 he was a guide, along with A L Hall, of the Shaler Memorial Expedition to South Africa, organized by Harvard University. On the expedition he met Alexander Du Toit, both geologists were among the (at that time rare) supporters of Alfred Wegeners' continental drift theory.
Molengraaff was a close friend of W. F. Gisolf, who named his youngest son after him but died in a Japanese concentration camp.
Molengraaff retired in 1930.

Ian McCaskill (born John Robertson McCaskill; 28 July 1938 – 10 December 2016) was a Scottish weather forecaster who frequently appeared on the BBC.

Laurent-Guillaume de Koninck (3 May 1809 – 16 July 1887) was a Belgian palaeontologist and chemist, born at Leuven.
He studied medicine in the university of his native town, and in 1831 he became assistant in the chemical schools. He pursued the study of chemistry in Paris, Berlin and Gießen, and was subsequently engaged in teaching the science at Ghent and Liège. In 1856 he was appointed professor of chemistry in the Liège University, and he retained this post until the close of his life.About the year 1835 he began to devote his leisure to the investigation of the Carboniferous fossils around Liège, and ultimately he became distinguished for his researches on the palaeontology of the Palaeozoic rocks, and especially for his descriptions of the molluscs, brachiopods, crustaceans and crinoids of the Carboniferous limestone of Belgium. In recognition of this work the Wollaston medal was awarded to him in 1875 by the Geological Society of London, and in 1876 he was appointed professor of palaeontology at Liège. In 1882, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.He was awarded the Clarke Medal by the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1886.Publications:

Eléments de chimie inorganique (1839)
Description des animaux fossiles qui se trouvent dans le terrain Carbonifère de Belgique (1842–1844, supp. 1851)
Recherches sur les animaux fossiles (1847, 1873)See Notice sur LG de Koninck, by E Dupont; Annuaire de l'Aced. roy. de Belgique (1891), with portrait and bibliography.

Charles Jacob (1878-1962) was a French geologist. He served as the president of the French National Centre for Scientific Research from 1940 to 1944 under Vichy France.

Paul Gabriel Hautefeuille (2 December 1836 in Étampes – 8 December 1902 in Paris) was a French mineralogist and chemist.

Marie Félix Albert Durand de Grossouvre (23 August 1849, Bourges – 18 May 1932, Bourges) was a French geologist, best known for his research in the fields of stratigraphy and paleontology.

François Cyrille Grand'Eury (9 March 1839, Houdreville – 22 July 1917, Malzéville) was a French geologist, paleontologist and mathematics teacher.
He studied at the École Loritz in Nancy and at the École des mines in Saint-Étienne, and later worked as a mining engineer in Roche-la-Molière. From 1863 to 1899 he taught classes in mathematics at the École des mines in Saint-Étienne, where in 1883 he received the title of professor.From 1877 he was a member of the Société géologique de France and in 1885 was elected a correspondent member of the Académie des Sciences.He is remembered for his stratigraphic research of coal fields and for his investigations involving the formation of coal. He is credited with establishing the chronological succession of floras associated with the coal seams of the Stephanian stage (named after the development of this stage at Saint-Étienne). He conducted exhaustive studies of coal flora (Cordaites, Calamites, et al), and in 1877 described the genus Tubiculites.

Dominique Alexandre Godron (25 March 1807 - 16 August 1880) was a French physician, botanist, geologist and speleologist born in the town of Hayange, in the département Moselle.
Godron studied medicine at the University of Strasbourg, and during his career distinguished himself in natural sciences as well as in the field of medicine. In 1854 he became dean and professor of natural history to the Faculty of Sciences at Nancy. Here he established a natural history museum and reorganized its botanical garden (now the Jardin Dominique Alexandre Godron, renamed in his honor).
Among his numerous writings were a publication on the flora of the Lorraine region of France called "Flore de Lorraine" (1843), and the three-volume "Flore de France", a work on flora native to France and Corsica that was co-written with botanist Jean Charles Marie Grenier (1808-1875). In addition to his botanical works, he published a number of studies in the field of ethnology.Before Mendel, he discovered the main features of hybridation. In "de l'Espece et des races dans les êtres organises" he also demonstrated that hybridization in the vegetal world was, against the dominant thinking at the time, similar to hybridization in the animal world. He finally demonstrated the unity of mankind in his book dedicated to our species.
In 1846, he was honoured by botanists Jean Baptiste Mougeot and Joseph Henri Léveillé who named Godronia, which is a genus of fungi in the family Helotiaceae. Then in 1927, William Webster Diehl and Edith Katherine Cash published Godroniopsis, which is also a genus of fungi in the family Helotiaceae.

Paul Frédéric Joseph Fourmarier (1877—1970) was a Belgian geologist and specialist in tectonics and stratigraphy, after whom the Fourmarierite mineral is named.Fourmarier was born in La Hulpe, Province of Brabant, Belgium and studied at the University of Liège, graduating in 1899. He became a professor of geology at the university in 1920.He won the Wollaston Medal in 1957 and the Penrose Gold Medal in 1952.

Paul Fallot (25 June 1889 in Strasbourg – 21 October 1960 in Paris) was a French geologist and paleontologist. Throughout his career the Mediterranean region, and especially Spain, was the focus of his work.
Fallot began his studies in 1908 at the University of Lausanne, under the well known geologist Maurice Lugeon. In 1909 he moved to Grenoble to work at the laboratory of geologist and paleontologist Wilfred Kilian on ammonites of the Balearic Islands. In 1910-1911 he broadens his knowledge of general geology and stratigraphy at the Sorbonne led with Emile Haug.
From 1914 to 1916 he serves in the French army, which earned him the Croix de Guerre, with five honorable mentions, and the Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur Cross.
After the war, Fallot was employed by his former teacher Kilian in Grenoble and continued his work in Mallorca. His "Geological Etude de la Sierra de Majorque" appears in 1922. The next year Paul Fallot was appointed director of the Institute of Applied Geology in Nancy, a position he keeps the next 14 years. With staff and students he worked in the Jura, but his main work he performed in the Betic ranges of southern Spain and the Rif Mountains of North Africa. In 1931 the Academy of Sciences grants Fallot the Grand Prix des Sciences physiques.
His appointment in 1937 as professor of Geology of the Mediterranean at the Collège de France, seemed the opportunity to scale up his work on the tectonics of the entire area with a team of specialists, but the outbreak of World War II hindered this. During the war he stayed in Paris, prepared publications of the Geological Service of Morocco, proposes a comprehensive document together on the geology of subbetische chains and analyzes the layers of the Triassic of Algeria.
In 1948 Paul Fallot was appointed as member of the Académie des Sciences. Fallot was also one of the foreign members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since May 1960. The Lower Cambrian trilobite genus Fallotaspis was named in his honour.