 Boisbaudran named his element samaria after the mineral samarskite , which in turn honored Vasili Samarsky @-@ Bykhovets ( 1803 – 1870 ) . Samarsky @-@ Bykhovets , as the Chief of Staff of the Russian Corps of Mining Engineers , had granted access for two German mineralogists , the brothers Gustav Rose and Heinrich Rose , to study the mineral samples from the Urals . In this sense samarium was the first chemical element to be named after a person . Later the name samaria used by Boisbaudran was transformed into samarium , to conform with other element names , and samaria nowadays is sometimes used to refer to samarium oxide , by analogy with yttria , zirconia , alumina , ceria , holmia , etc . The symbol Sm was suggested for samarium ; however an alternative Sa was frequently used instead until the 1920s . 
