Dan Shechtman
Dan Shechtman
Dan Shechtman is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, and Professor of Materials Science at Iowa State University. On April 8, 1982, while on sabbatical at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., Shechtman discovered the icosahedral phase, which opened the new field of quasiperiodic crystals. Shechtman was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of...
NationalityIsraeli
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth24 January 1941
CountryIsrael
I think I can change things for the better in this country. I'm doing it now as well, in many areas, mostly in education, higher education and technological entrepreneurship. But I think I could do a lot more from a presidential position.
Sustainable development requires human ingenuity. People are the most important resource.
My childhood dream was to study mechanical engineering. After reading 'The Mysterious Island' - which I read 25 times as a boy - I thought that was the best thing a person could do. The engineer in the book knows mechanics and physics, and he creates a whole way of life on the island out of nothing. I wanted to be like that.
Korean students are hard working, talented, and they do what they need to do. They succeed in exams. They are highly motivated to succeed in tests.
I was a subject of ridicule and lectures about the basics of crystallography. The leader of the opposition to my findings was the two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, the idol of the American Chemical Society and one of the most famous scientists in the world.
Wherever I go in the world, I'm treated like royalty.
On April 8, 1982, I was alone in the electron microscope room when I discovered the Icosahedral Phase that opened the field of quasi-periodic crystals.
I'm proud of my family, very proud - I have ten grandchildren, four children, and one wife.
The message from the Technion when I was a student was: 'You will be so good that when you graduate, everyone will want to hire you.'
I told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me.
Crystallographers believed in X-ray results, which are of course very accurate. But the x-rays are limited, and electron microscopy filled the gap, and so the discovery of quasicrystals could have been discovered only by electron microscopy, and the community of crystallographers, for several years, was not willing to listen.
Young people in Israel are encouraged to design, produce and sell their products from high school. Technical universities also matter. Teach and introduce entrepreneurship courses in technical universities.
I told myself, 'I am teaching entrepreneurship, so I should be an entrepreneur myself.'
Israel, in general, should learn from other nations. We have a tendency to teach the world. In many cases, we should learn from the world, because they make advances.