NOBEL PRIZE LAUREATE DAN SHECHTMAN GUEST OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NOVI SAD

The Nobel Prize laureate Professor Dan Shechtman, a prominent professor at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and the professor of Iowa State University, visited the University of Novi Sad, 15 May 2023. On this occasion, Professor Shechtman held a lecture on quasi crystals, for which discovery in the early 1980s he was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011.

Before the lecture, Professor Shechtman and his wife, Professor Zipora Shechtman from the University of Haifa, met with the Rector Prof. Dr. Dejan Madić and the Vice-Rectors Prof. Dr. Sabina Halupka Rešetar, Prof. Dr. Nikola Jorgovanović and Prof. Dr. Đorđe Herceg, together with Prof. Dr. Veljko Milutinović with whose support was this visit was organized. The programme in Novi Sad also included a sightseeing of the city and visit to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts Novi Sad Branch.

During his lecture in the Rectorate building, Professor Shechtman spoke about his scientific work, the discovery of quasi crystals and a turbulent period that followed it before the global scientific community acknowledged the discovery, which shifted the paradigm in crystallography. In its official press release on awarding the Nobel Prize to Professor Shechtman, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stated: “In quasicrystals, we find the fascinating mosaics of the Arabic world reproduced at the level of atoms: regular patterns that never repeat themselves”, and that the Nobel Prize for this discovery “has fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter”.