This book comprises papers resulting from the 1st International workshop Minerals as Advanced Materials I . It is intended as an exchange of ideas between mineralogists and material scientists. The aim is to identify minerals and mineral objects that have or potentially have unique physical, chemical and structural properties that are of interest from the viewpoint of applied mineralogy and material science. The author studied Crystallography at the St.Petersburg State University.

"Highlights in Mineralogical Crystallography" presents a collection of review articles with the common topic: structural properties of minerals and synthetic analogues. It is a valuable resource for mineralogists, materials scientists, crystallographers, and earth scientists. This book includes: An introduction to the RRUFF database for structural, spectroscopic, and chemical mineral identification. A systematic evaluation of structural complexity of minerals. ab initio computer modelling of mineral surfaces. Natural quasicrystals of meteoritic origin. The potential role of terrestrial ringwoodite on the water content of the Earth's mantle. Structural characterization of nanocrystalline bio-related minerals by electron-diffraction tomography. The uniqueness of mayenite-type compounds as minerals and high-tech ceramics.

This book is the first book dealing with structural crystallography of inorganic oxysalts in general. A special emphasis is placed upon structural topology and methods of its description. The latter include graph theory, nets, 2-D and 3-D tilings, polyhedra, etc. The structures considered range from minerals to organically templated oxysalts, for all of which this book provides a unified approach to structure interpretation and classification. Most of the structures have been analysed from the proposed viewpoint for the first time and it has been shown that they possess the same topological genealogy and relationships, sometimes despite their obvious chemical differences. In order to expand the range of oxysalts considered, the book offers not only traditional schemes but also alternative approaches such as anion topologis, anion-centered polyhedra and cation arrays. As such, this book can be considered as a comprehensive introduction into the amazingly complex and diverse world of inorganic oxysalts.

This book comprises papers resulting from the 1st International workshop Minerals as Advanced Materials I . It is intended as an exchange of ideas between mineralogists and material scientists. The aim is to identify minerals and mineral objects that have or potentially have unique physical, chemical and structural properties that are of interest from the viewpoint of applied mineralogy and material science. The author studied Crystallography at the St.Petersburg State University.