Dan Shechtman is an Israeli scientist, who was bestowed with the highly-esteemed Nobel Prize for his discovery of quasiperiodic crystals. Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, he did his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering and Material Engineering, respectively from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and later on completed his Ph.D. in Materials Engineering from the same institute. It was at his alma mater that he commenced his career. In 1992, he took a sabbatical for two years and enrolled at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland, America, where he studied the effect of the defect structure of CVD diamond on its growth and properties. It was while at NIST that he first discovered the icosahedral phase, which opened the new field of quasiperiodic crystals. Interestingly, Linus Pauling, two-times Nobel laureate and idol of American Chemical Society, opposed his discovery till the very end against quasi-periodicity in crystals. However, scientists finally approved his discovery, for which he was eventually conferred with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011.
