Shechtman

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Dan Shechtman was an Israeli chemist who won the Nobel Prize for discovering quasicrystals
2. A surname belonging to the Israeli materials scientist famed for discovering quasicrystal atomic structures
3. The name of an Israeli chemist recognized for identifying quasicrystals, a discovery earning a Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Etymology: Shechtman is a surname, and its root is an occupation. It likely comes from the Yiddish or German "Schächter," a ritual slaughterer, from the Hebrew "shochet" with the same meaning. The ending "-man" is the common German and Yiddish word for "man," so the name probably began as a label for the man who performed this job. The name is now best known through the materials scientist Dan Shechtman, who in 1982 observed an aluminium-manganese alloy whose atoms formed a pattern with fivefold symmetry, which was thought impossible for a crystal. The discovery led to the new category of quasicrystals, and he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011.