THE ROYAL SWEDISH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
When Daniel Shechtman entered the discovery awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 into his notebook, he jotted down three question marks next to it. The atoms in the crystal in front of him yielded a forbidden symmetry. It was just as impossible as a football - a sphere - made of only six-cornered polygons. Since then, mosaics with intriguing patterns and the golden ratio in mathematics and art have helped scientists to explain Shechtman's bewildering observation. …
