Dan Shechtmanborn 1941
Discovered quasicrystals, 1982
Israeli materials scientist who in 1982 saw five-fold symmetry in a metal alloy, discovering quasicrystals and winning the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Quasicrystal
Five or seven flat waves laid over one another at equal angles. Order everywhere, and the same patch never twice.
About this pattern
Dan Shechtman, 1982 · Penrose and de Bruijn's five-fold symmetry
Add plane waves at equally spaced angles and the sum has the symmetry of that number of directions. With four or six it settles into an ordinary repeating lattice, because those angles are commensurate. With five, seven or eleven no repeat is possible, and the field fills with rosettes that look placed by hand and are entirely determined, with the same order Penrose found in his tiles and Shechtman later found in metal.
Behind the mathematics
Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn1918–2012
Five-fold grids
Dutch mathematician who showed that Penrose's aperiodic tilings fall out of five crossing families of parallel lines, turning an intricate construction into arithmetic.
Roger Penroseborn 1931
Five-fold tiling
British mathematical physicist whose non-periodic tilings and work on impossible geometry reshaped how repetition and symmetry are understood.