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
The good people look for challenges. When teaching becomes a prestigious profession, then you'll get good people.
I told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can unite the people of Israel, so I won't speak about controversial issues, which divide the people.
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.
I see the root of the education crisis in the primary and secondary schools. Academia is doing a fairly good job. The root of the problem is the teachers. Some are great. But too many of them are not capable of being good role models. They can't control the classes. They lose too much time trying to create a learning environment.
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.
The Technion didn't teach students how to open a start-up.
Science is the ultimate tool to reveal the laws of nature, and the one word written on its banner is Truth.
Select a subject that interests you and make an effort to become an expert in that field. I promise you, if you make the effort, and you become an expert, you will have a wonderful career.