William Hollowes Miller

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William Hollowes Miller

1801-1880

British mineralogist who in 1839 developed a method using spherical trigonometry to describe how crystal faces were orientated about a crystal. A professor of mineralogy at Cambridge University, Miller used numbers derived from the intercepts of the crystal faces on a mineral's crystallographic axes to characterize the position of any crystal face. These numbers, known as Miller indices, define the position and orientation of a crystal face.

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