James Byron Friauf (1896 1972) was an American electrical engineer who first determined the crystal structure of MgZn<sub>2</sub> in 1927. Friauf was a professor of physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University. He had received training in the determination of the structure of crystals as a student at California Institute of Technology where he studied with Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson.
The structure Friauf discovered consists of intra-penetrating icosahedra, which coordinate the Zn atoms, and 16-vertex polyhedra that coordinate the Mg atoms. The latter type of polyhedron is called a Friauf polyhedron and is, actually, an inter-penetrating tetrahedron and a 12-vertex truncated polyhedron. MgZn<sub>2</sub> is a member of the largest class of single intermetallic structures, since referred to as the Laves phases, the Friauf phases, or the LavesâÂÂFriauf phases.