Alan Lindsay Mackay
| Alan Lindsay Mackay | |
|---|---|
Alan Lindsay Mackay
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| Born |
6 September 1926 Wolverhampton |
| Residence | London |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | crystallography |
| Institutions | Birkbeck College |
| Alma mater | Oundle School, University of Cambridge, Birkbeck College, University of London |
| Doctoral advisor | John Desmond Bernal |
| Doctoral students | Humberto Terrones, Richard Newman |
| Known for | Quasicrystals, Mackay icosahedra, periodic minimal surfaces, generalized crystallography |
| Notable awards | Buckley Prize |
Alan Lindsay Mackay FRS (born 6 September 1926) is a British crystallographer, born in Wolverhampton. He spent his scientific career at Birkbeck College, founded by George Birkbeck, one of the Colleges of the University of London, where he was immersed in a liberal scientific atmosphere under the leadership of John Desmond Bernal. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) on 17 March 1988 and a Fellow of Birkbeck College on 2 March 2002. He is also a Fellow of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. Mackay has made important scientific contributions related to the structure of materials: In 1962 he published a manuscript that showed 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 in 1981 predicted quasicrystals in a paper (in Russian) entitled "De Nive Quinquangula" in which he used a Penrose tiling in two and three dimensions to predict a new kind of ordered structures not allowed by traditional crystallography. In a later manuscript, in 1982, he took 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 Mackay was awarded the Buckley Prize, of 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.
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