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 told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me.
A president should look for what binds the people together rather than what drives them apart. As soon as you are identified with one side of the political map, you are no longer everybody's president.
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.
In the forefront of science, there is not much difference between religion and science. People harbor beliefs. That's what happens when people believe something religiously.
The good people look for challenges. When teaching becomes a prestigious profession, then you'll get good people.
I always say that people are like peanut shells on the ocean: the waves will take them everywhere.
Sustainable development requires human ingenuity. People are the most important resource.
I can unite the people of Israel, so I won't speak about controversial issues, which divide the people.
In most cases, the news is not really news. But in some cases, discoveries are made and should be listened to.
I know there is a stereotype that I am naive, but I know what I want, and I know what I'm doing to get there.
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.'
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.