User:Quasicrystal007/Alan Lindsay Mackay

Alan L. Mackay (Alan Lindsay Mackay) is a British Crystallographer, born in Wolverhampton on 6 September 1926. He spent his scientific career at Birkbeck_College  (one of the Colleges of the University of London, founded by George_Birkbeck) where he was immersed in a liberal scientific atmosphere under the leadership of John_Desmond_Bernal. He became Fellow_of_the_Royal_Society (FRS) on 17 march 1988 and Fellow of Birkbeck_College on 2 march 2002 http://www.bbk.ac.uk/about_us/fellows. He is also fellow of Mexican_Academy_of_Sciences. Alan Mackay has made important scientific contributions related to the structure of materials: In 1962 he published a manuscript which shows how to pack atoms in an icosahedral fashion, a first step towards five-fold symmetry in materials science. These arrangements are now called "Mackay Icosahedra". He is a pioneer in the introduction of five fold symmetry in materials and predicted Quasicrystals in 1981 in a paper (in Russian) entitled "The Nive Quinquangula" in which he uses the Penrose_tiling in two and three dimensions to predict a new kind of ordered structures not allowed by the traditional crystallography. In a Later manuscript in 1982, he takes the optical Fourier_transform of a 2-D Penrose Tiling decorated with atoms obtaining a pattern with sharp spots and five-fold symmetry. This brought the possibility of identifying quasiperiodic order in a material through diffraction. Quasicrystals with icosahedral symmetry were found by Dan_Shechtman and co-workers in 1984. For his contributions to Quasicrystals in 2010 he was awarded the Buckley_Prize http://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes/prizerecipient.cfm?name=Alan%20Mackay&year=2010, from the American_Physical_Society, with Dov Levine and Paul_Steinhardt. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 2011 to Dan Shechtman for the discovery of quasicrystals.

Alan L. Mackay has been interested in a more generalized crystallography which can describe not only crystals, but more complex structures and nanomaterials. He has applied his ideas of minimal_surfaces in graphitic materials proposing, with Humberto Terrones, periodic arrangements of carbon atoms with negative Gaussian Curvature known as Schwarzites which are the periodic cousins of Buckminsterfullerenes

Alan L. Mackay has written a book on scientific quotations and co-author a book on geometry with Eric A. Lord and S. Ranganathan.