The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in
Chemistry for 2011 to Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman of the
Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Shechtman is the tenth Israeli or Israeli-born scientist to win a Nobel Prize, and the third to win 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."
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.
RELATED:Three Americans awarded Nobel Prize in
physicsNobel medicine prize honors work on body's
defensesShechtman 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.