Victor Mordechai Goldschmidt (February 10, 1853, in Mainz - May 8, 1933, in Salzburg) was a German mineralogist, natural philosopher, and art collector.
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Born 1853 in Mainz, Goldschmidt attended the Bergakademie Freiberg in Saxony and graduated in engineering in 1874. He received his doctorate in 1880 in Heidelberg about mechanical rock analysis, and continued his studies in Vienna from 1882 to 1887. In 1888 he wrote his habilitation about "Projektion und graphische Krystallberechnung" under the same supervisor like his doctoral dissertation. He founded the Institut für Mineralogie und Kristallographie in Heidelberg from private money. In 1893, he became an adjunct professor (Honorarprofessor) at the University of Heidelberg and in 1913, he was awarded membership in the "Akademie der Wissenschaften Heidelberg".
His Atlas der Krystallformen grew from 1913 until 1923. At this time, in 1917, he was made a geheimer Hofrat ("secret court councilor"). In 1923, he was made an honorary member of the Naturhistorisch-Medizinischen Verein Heidelberg. In 1919, he donated his and his wife's extensive collection of art and ethnographic artefacts as Josephine and Eduard von Portheim-Stiftung to the state of Baden. In 1933, the curatorium of the "v. Portheim-Stiftung" gave its mineralogical-crystallographical institute the name Victor-Goldschmidt-Institut für Kristallforschung. While on the faculty at Heidelberg, one of his later famous students was Thomas Jaggar.
The Goldschmidts of Frankfurt, contributed significantly to the founding of Goethe University Frankfurt.