Luca Bindi

Luca Bindi (born 1971) is an Italian geologist. He holds the Chair of Mineralogy and Crystallography and is the Head of the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Florence. He is also a research associate at the Istituto di Geoscienze e Georisorse of the National Research Council (Italy) (CNR). He has received national and international scientific awards that include the President of the Republic Prize 2015 in the category of Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences. Since 2019 is a Member of the National Academy of Lincei.

He is the Italian scientist who has contributed to the description of the highest number of new minerals and is among the top ten researchers in the world for the number of new mineralogical species described. In his career he has described about 2% of the 6,000 minerals known in nature. Most of the new materials were discovered in the precious patrimony of the collections of the Museum System of the Florentine University, with its approximately fifty thousand specimens. The researcher is entitled to a further record: among the 130 minerals he described there are 15 extraterrestrials (almost 3% of the 500 discovered), identified in meteorite fragments.

Bindi is credited with the co-discovery of the first known natural quasicrystal, having identified a potential candidate from the mineral collection at the "Università di Firenze". The discovery ultimately showed that quasicrystals can form spontaneously in nature and remain stable for geological times. Provided by Wikipedia