Haüy's 250th Birthday!

"He doesn't look a day over 60!"

Abbe Rene-Just Haüy (1743–1822) is considered one of the founders of Modern Crystallography. He established the law of simple rational intercepts and showed that it is possible to reproduce the natural faces of crystals by stacking elementary blocks according to very simple laws. For instance, he reproduced the calcite scalenohedron by stacking small rhombohedra parallel to the cleavage rhombohedron. These blocks, which he called "molecules intégrantes," were the forerunners of what we now call the "unit cell". A stele commemorating Haüy's 250th birthday was inaugurated on Feb. 28, 1993 at his birth place, Saint-Just en Chaussee (Oise), in the North of France, in the presence of H. Curien, French Minister of Research, Prof. of Cryst., P. et M. Curie U. in Paris.