Recipient: Didier De Fontaine

Quote:
"When I was a Metallurgical Engineering student in my native Belgium, at the Catholic University of Louvain, the instructor taught the Physical Metallurgy course out of a textbook by William Hume-Rothery. That in itself was quite unusual. In Europe in those days, instructors taught from their own notes (which they had often pirated from English-language textbooks), but this professor was different. He had obtained an MS degree from Stanford and was familiar with Anglo-Saxon ways of doing things. As a result, I learned about the great Oxford Physicist/Metallurgist Hume-Rothery very early on and his excellent textbook played no small role in the orientation of my career. Hume-Rothery was a hero in undergraduate school, but of course, I could not even dream that some day my name would be associated with that of the great man himself."

Biography:
Didier De Fontaine is professor emeritus in the Department of Materials Science and Minerals Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.