Dan Shechtman

Dan Shechtman is an Israeli materials scientist, born in Tel Aviv in 1941, who holds a PhD in materials engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, where he is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science. While on sabbatical at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards on April 8, 1982, he discovered a metallic alloy exhibiting an icosahedral atomic structure with a symmetry long believed impossible in solid crystals, work that launched the study of quasiperiodic crystals, or quasicrystals, as a new field of materials science. The finding was initially met with fierce resistance from the scientific establishment, most notably from two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, who publicly dismissed the idea, and colleagues within his own research group reportedly asked him to leave over the claim; only by 1987 had other scientists confirmed his results. Shechtman was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of quasicrystals, becoming one of only six Israelis to receive a Nobel Prize.