Dan Shechtman

Origins and early life

Dan Shechtman was born in Tel Aviv on 24 January 1941, in what was still Mandatory Palestine, and grew up in Petah Tikva and Ramat Gan in a Jewish family whose grandparents had come during the Second Aliyah and founded a printing house.

Work and career

As a boy he read Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island over and over: the engineer Cyrus Smith, who builds a whole way of living out of nothing, was what he wanted to be. On 8 April 1982, on sabbatical from the Technion at the United States National Bureau of Standards, he pointed an electron beam at an aluminium-manganese alloy and saw a diffraction pattern with tenfold symmetry. Crystallography held that impossible: a crystal repeats, and a pattern that repeats cannot have fivefold symmetry.

What he had found was matter that is ordered without ever repeating — the icosahedral phase, and with it a whole class of solids now called quasicrystals. He kept the observation and the field caught up with it, other laboratories reproducing the result until the definition of a crystal itself had to be rewritten. He is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion and also teaches at Iowa State University. The Israel Prize in physics came in 1998, the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1999, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011.