What they’re saying about Nobel Laureate Dan Shechtman

Technion Nobel Laureate (Chemistry 2004) shares his experience
with his colleague Shechtman, Nobel Laureate (Chemistry, 2011)



“I salute you, you gave the people of Israel a wonderful gift. This is a great day for Haifa, a great day for the Technion.”

President of the State of Israel Shimon Peres

“It’s been an honor to congratulate him today and I look forward to working more with the Technion in the future.”

Swedish Ambassador to Israel Elinor Hammarskjöld 


“I would like to congratulate you, on behalf of the citizens of Israel, for your award, which expresses the intellect of our people. Every Israeli is happy today and every Jew in the world is proud. I also congratulated your institution, the Technion, on the centenary of its founding.”



Prime Minister of the State of Israel Benyamin Netanyahu


“Congratulations from your your granddaughter’s school in California….our class is so proud of you for your research and findings.”
KIM PRESCOTT, TEACHER



From the Scientists


“Dan Shechtman comes along and proves us all wrong. It’s the next step in crystallography. It is outrageous. It is fantastic. Before Dr. Shechtman’s discovery, this was thought impossible. It absolutely deserves the Nobel.” 


Peter Mueller, MIT

“Dan is a very careful experimentalist and what he did, he did right. He violated a dogma of crystallography – at that time some 200 years old – and nevertheless defended it”.

Prof. Knut Urban, professor of experimental physics at RWTH Aachen University, Germany


“Dan spent two years convincing everybody  about his discovery. This is a revolution in physics, in crystallography.”


Prof. An-Pang Tsai, Tohuku University, Japan,

“I had more or less the same alloys as Shechtman at the same time, but I did not recognize them to be quasicrystals.”


Prof. Jean-Marie Dubois, CNRS—French National Center for Scientific Research,


“It is not always enough to make the discovery, you have to fight and advocate on its behalf…without Danny’s patience, stubbornness, and tenacity it would have been much more challenging.”


Prof. Peretz Lavie, Technion president:

“It became clear that an old paradigm had crashed and a new one was emerging.”


Prof. Marjorie Senechal, mathematical crystallographer at Smith College, Massachusetts

“Dan Shechtman is a real teacher and mentor and role model in the faculty.”


Dr Boaz Pokroy, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Materials Engineering

“Danny Shechtman made a very important discovery. I think this discovery is an excellent example for which a Nobel Prize should be given.”


Prof. István Hargittai, Budapest University of Technology and Economics

“There is a community of international scientists who couldn’t communicate with each other before the discovery of quasicrystals and now speak the language of quasiperiodicity.”


Distinguished Prof. Dan Shechtman

 “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.”


Linus Pauling, Nobel laureate.