Holger Motzkau · CC BY-SA 3.0

While on sabbatical at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards in 1982, Shechtman found a metallic structure with a pattern that repeated without ever exactly repeating — the icosahedral phase, which founded the field of quasicrystals and broke a rule crystallographers had treated as settled. The discovery won him the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; he continues to teach materials science at the Technion and Iowa State.