Emil Cohen

Emil Wilhelm Cohen (12 October 1842 – 13 April 1905) was a German mineralogist, born in Jutland.

He studied at the universities of Berlin and Heidelberg and from 1867 to 1872 was assistant in mineralogy in the latter university. He then spent a year and a half in South Africa, where he studied diamond and gold deposits.

He devoted the following years to mineralogy studies and to preparing works describing his African explorations. Through his Sammlung von Mikrophotographien zur Veranschaulichung der mikroskopischen Structur von Mineralien und Gesteinen (1881–83; "Collection of Microphotographs on the microscopic Structure of Minerals and Rocks"), he became a founder of modern petrography.

In 1878 he became professor of petrography at Strasbourg and Director of the Geological Survey for Alsace and Lorraine.

In 1885 he was made professor of mineralogy at the University of Greifswald. There he started work on meteorites and was one of the first mineralogists to describe the petrography of iron meteorites and their accessory minerals. He detected diamonds there, and he isolated and analyzed an iron carbide mineral. This mineral was later named Cohenite after him.

His published works include the following:

• Geognostisch-petrographische Skizzen aus Südafrika (1874)
• Erläuternde Bemerkungen zu der Routenkarte einer Reise Lydenburg• nach den Goldfeldern und von Lydenburg nach der Delagoabai im östlichen Südafrika ( 1875)
• Sammlung von Mikrophotographien zur Veranschaulichung der mikroskopischen Struktur von Mineralien und Gesteinen (1881–83; third edition, 1899)
• Meteoritenkunde (second edition, 1903)
• Meteoreisenstudien (1891-1900, eleven numbers)