BICOM

Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman of the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Technion, won this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Shechtman discovered quasicrystals, which have non-repeating patterns the committee described as “fascinating mosaics of the Arabic world reproduced at the level of atoms.”Shechtman is the tenth Israeli or Israeli-born scientist to win a Nobel Prize, and the third to win for chemistry. Shechtman received phone calls congratulating him from both Israel’s President and Prime Minister.                                            

Prior to his discovery, crystals were thought to only have repeating patterns. The controversy of his finding was so great that Shechtman was asked, at one point, to leave his research group. His research, ultimately, prevailed, using Arabic mosaic patterns, which rely on mathematical non-repeating patterns, as a model.

Shechtman was born 1941 in Tel Aviv, and earned his Ph.D. at the Technion in 1972. 

He will receive a prize of 10 million Swedish Kroner, equivalent to $1.46 million.