Video: How Big, Beautiful Crystals Form by Dr. John Rakovan
Dr. John Rakovan
In 2016, Dr. John Rakovan participated as one of our speakers at the Dallas Mineral Collecting Symposium, and the topics covered in his talk are ones we regularly address here at The Arkenstone.
How do crystals form with such geometric shapes? Why do some crystals get big, while others stay small? What controls the different crystal shapes that are formed naturally?
If you’ve ever thought about some of these questions, we hope you’ll find Dr. Rakovan’s talk to be informative.
Dr. John Rakovan is a professor of mineralogy at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. John received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1996 and spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Virginia Tech before starting at Miami. He has broad research interests including crystal growth, structural and morphologic crystallography, mineral-water interface geochemistry, and mineral deposit formation. Much of his work falls into the broad area of environmental mineralogy. He is a fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America (MSA) and has served the MSA and other societies (e.g., the International Mineralogical Association) in many capacities including the subcommittee on apatite-group nomenclature. John has been a mineral collector for more than forty years with particular interests in apatite, minerals from Japan, and specimens with interesting mineralogical characteristics (i.e. twinning, epitaxy, etc.). He has been an executive editor of and regular contributor to Rocks & Minerals magazine since 2001. In 2010, the decavanadate mineral rakovanite, discovered by Joe Marty in the Sunday Mine, Colorado, was named in his honor.
The Dallas Symposium is lucky to have BlueCap Productions on hand each year to provide valuable videography services. If you love learning about fine minerals, check out their Video OnDemand options to view previous videos of the Dallas Symposium, the popular What’s Hot in Tucson/Munich/Sainte Marie series, and several other popular mineral productions. Prefer hard copies? DVDs are for sale here.
