Quasicrystals where first discovered by Dan Shechtaman of the
Technion in Israel when he was at the National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST) to find a lighter and stronger aluminum alloy.
Of the several alloys he tested for diffraction patterns. One of them,
a manganese and aluminum alloy produced a pattern not characteristic of
neither glass nor crystal. After a lot convincing to others that what
he found was indeed real. He made the announcement in November 1984.
On the otherside of the globe also in the same year, on a more
geometric based problem Paul Steinhardt, a physicist at the University
of Pennsylvania was playing with three-dimensional nonperiodic tiling.
He and his graduate student Don Levine programmed a computer to
calculate the theoretical diffraction patterns these structures
would produce if it where made of real atoms instead of imaginary tiles.
