About Dan Shechtman
Dan Shechtman (Hebrew: דן שכטמן; born January 24, 1941) is an Israeli chemist, the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy's Ames National 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, also referred to as "quasicrystals." For this discovery, he was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, making him one of six Israelis who have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. == Biography == === Early life === Dan Shechtman was born in 1941 in Tel Aviv, in what was then Mandatory Palestine; the city became part of the new state of Israel in 1948. He grew up in Petah Tikva and Ramat Gan in a Jewish family. His grandparents had immigrated to Palestine during the Second Aliyah (1904–1914) and founded a printing house. As a child, Shechtman was fascinated by Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island (1874), which he read many times. His childhood dream was to become an engineer like the main protagonist, Cyrus Smith. 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.
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