” When I returned to the Technion in 1984, I collaborated with Professor Ilan Blech on the first quasi-periodical crystal paper. Professor Blech developed a model that described how such material could form. The model is derived

from pentagonal symmetry, which is one of the rotational Akt inhibitor symmetries of three-dimensional bodies called icosahedrons. To simplify, imagine a football, or as the Americans call it, a soccer ball. This ball is made of pentagonal and hexagonal patches (Figure 7) and clearly has five-fold, three-fold, and two-fold symmetries (Figure 7; left, middle, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and right panels, respectively). Icosahedral symmetry also has these features. This was the model that we proposed for our crystal. Figure 7 The icosahedron’s main rotational symmetries. In mid-1984, we sent the paper to the Journal of Applied Physics, and within two weeks it was returned with a letter stating that the Journal was not interested in this manuscript and that the topic would not interest the community Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of physicists. They suggested sending the manuscript to a metallurgical journal. I subsequently sent this paper to the journal Metallurgical Transactions, where it was accepted for publication. However, the paper was scheduled to Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical be published

only in June of 1985. In the summer of 1984 I was back at the National Bureau of Standards. Professor Cahn suggested writing a shortened version of the same paper and submitting it to a journal that would publish it more quickly. We Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical wrote a shortened version together with Dr. Denis Gratias, a mathematical crystallographer from France; the paper was subsequently published on November 12, 1984 in the journal Physical Review Letters. Since I knew my discovery was controversial,

I wanted anyone who had the appropriate equipment to be able to prepare this crystal and see the results under an electron microscope. I was therefore meticulous in providing all the details. A few days after Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical publication, I began receiving phone calls from researchers around the world saying that they too had seen what I saw. I was witnessing a growing community of powerful, amazing, young, avant-garde, quasi-periodic scientists. Eminent physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and material scientists around the world started creating the science of quasi-periodic materials. However, changing paradigms is never easy, and this case was no different. THE PARADIGM SHIFTS SLOWLY To date, most else crystallographers use X-ray diffracttion as their primary and often exclusive research tool. They believe that X-ray diffraction is more precise than electron microscopy crystallography. I was in the minority, using electron microscopy to study crystals. The minimum size of crystals used in X-ray crystallography was a fraction of a millimeter, while crystals used in electron microscopy can be nanometers in size, and the size of my crystals was about one micron.