Bruno Sander

Hermann Max Bruno Sander (23 February 1884, Innsbruck – 5 September 1979, Innsbruck) was an Austrian geologist. He is known, along with Walter Schmidt (1885–1945), for founding petrofabric analysis (sometimes called structural petrology).

Biography Bruno Sander, whose father was a public prosecutor, spent his boyhood in what was then Bozen in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After graduating from secondary school and successfully completing in 1902 his Matura in Innsbruck, he studied zoology, mineralogy, botany, physics, and mathematics at the University of Innsbruck. There he received in 1907 his doctorate in geology with a study on granites in the region near Brixen in the Sarntal Alps. His doctoral dissertation, supervised by Josef Blaas (1851–1936), is entitled Geologische Beschreibung des Brixner Granits. Sander worked as an academic assistant from 1907 to 1909 at TH Wien and from 1909 to 1913 at the University of Innsbruck, where he completed his habilitation in 1912. During his military service, he was a commissioned officer with the title Lagerstättenebegutacher (mineral deposit surveyor) under the command of K.u.K. Kriegsministerium. Part of his duty was in 1917–1918 investigating bituminous marl in the mountains of Bulgaria and Turkey. According to Eleanora Bliss Knopf, Sander's 1911 paper Über Zusammenhänge zwischen Teilbewegung und Gefüge in Gesteinen is a "milestone in petrology". A central idea in Sander's research is that the symmetries of geological bodies, both macroscopic and microscopic, reflect various symmetries of the depositing media that created the deposit in which the geological bodies are located.

In addition to his work as a geologist, he was also a writer who published under the pseudonym Anton Santer. He belonged to the Brenner group before WW I The building of the Faculty of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Innsbruck was named after Bruno Sander. He is also the namesake of the Sander Pass in Antarctica.

In 1920 he married Elisabeth Holzknecht (1897–1997). They had one daughter.

Selected publications Zur Geologie der Zentralalpen (On the geology of the Central Alps), Verhandlungen der Kaiserliche-Königlichen Geologischen Reichanstalt. 1916, Nr. 9 & Nr. 10. Gefügekunde der Gesteine mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Tektonite (Structural science of rocks with special consideration of tectonites), Wien, Springer Verlag 1930.

Einführung in die Gefügekunde geologischer Körper (Introduction to the structural science of geological bodies), 2 volumes, Springer Verlag 1948 & 1950. An introduction to the study of fabrics of geological bodies, Pergamon Press 1970; translation by Frank Coles Phillips and George Windsor

Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Ablagerungsgefüges (Contributions to the knowledge of the accretion structure), Tschermaks Mineralogische und Petrographische Mitteilungen, volume 48, 1936, pp. 27–209. Petrofabrics and Orogenesis, American Journal of Science, series 5, volume 28, 1934, pp. 37–50.