Dan Shechtman — materials scientist with roots in the Russian Empire
Dan Shechtman was born in Tel Aviv on 24 January 1941. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his grandparents, who, according to the Technion's account at the time of his Nobel Prize and his own remarks, came from Russia to Ottoman Palestine in 1906, during the wave of immigration known as the Second Aliyah, and founded a printing house. Speaking of that generation, Shechtman has noted that most of those who came with the Second Aliyah later left again. The grandparents' town is not recorded.
He studied at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, taking his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in 1966, his master's in 1968 and his doctorate in materials engineering in 1972. After three years of postdoctoral work at the Aerospace Research Laboratories at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, he returned to the Technion, where he became a professor in 1984.
On a sabbatical from 1981 to 1983 at Johns Hopkins University and the US National Bureau of Standards, he was studying rapidly cooled aluminium-manganese alloys under an electron microscope when, on 8 April 1982, he saw a diffraction pattern with tenfold symmetry, which classical crystallography held to be impossible. He wrote "10-fold???" in his laboratory notebook. The structure he had found was ordered but not periodic, what came to be called a quasicrystal. His colleagues were sceptical, and the head of his research group asked him to leave it; his paper was rejected before it was published in 1984 with Ilan Blech, Denis Gratias and John Cahn. Linus Pauling was among the most prominent opponents, remarking that there were no quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists. Over the following years laboratories around the world reproduced the result, and in the early 1990s the International Union of Crystallography changed its definition of a crystal to include such structures.
Shechtman received the Israel Prize in 1998 and the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1999, and in 2011 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone, for the discovery of quasicrystals. From 2004 he also held an appointment at Iowa State University and the Ames Laboratory. In 2014 he stood as a candidate for President of Israel. He has remained a professor at the Technion and a frequent public speaker on science.
"Grandparents: Russia to Ottoman Palestine, 1906 (Second Aliyah)."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Russian Empire (grandparents; town not documented) — to Palestine in 1906
His grandparents came from Russia to Ottoman Palestine in 1906, with the Second Aliyah, and set up a printing house there, according to the Technion and his own remarks. Their town is not recorded.
Grandparents emigrated from Russia to Palestine in 1906 (Second Aliyah).
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Russian Empire (grandparents; town not documented) — to Palestine in 1906. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"There is no such thing as a single-scientist discovery. But sometimes one person holds the key."