2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Dan Shechtman. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 5 October 2011.

The citation

The citation reads: "for the discovery of quasicrystals".

The laureate

Dan Shechtman was born in 1941 in Tel Aviv, British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel), and is affiliated with Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa.

Why it matters

Shechtman found crystals with a pattern that never repeats, which many scientists said was impossible. He faced ridicule for years before his discovery was accepted.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.