Abstract
I came to know Torvard Laurent (1930–2009) through Lars Ernster (see a separate chapter) to whom I had been introduced by George Olah (also, in a separate chapter) in February 1996 at the University of Southern California. Laurent came to Budapest late spring in 1996 and this is when we met for the first time. However, his Hungarian interactions dated back to the start of his professional career. Laurent was born into a family of Swedish academics and was destined for a brilliant career in academia, but this did not make him conceited. He worked hard throughout his entire life and left nothing to chance. He was 17 when he embarked on his studies in medicine as a student at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. His interests focused on tissue cultures.
Nobel Matters
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Notes
- 1.
Crystals have regular and periodic structures. In contrast, the structure of amorphous materials is not regular neither periodic. The quasicrystals , discovered by Shechtman in 1983, are regular, but non-periodic. At the time of their discovery the quasicrystals were considered to be outside of the realm of crystallography. By now, they have been incorporated into an expanded crystallography.
- 2.
I. Hargittai, T. C. Laurent, eds., Symmetry 2000 , Parts 1 and 2 (London: Portland Press, 2002).
- 3.
Hargittai M., Hargittai I., Fedezzük föl a szimmetriát! (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1989). The Swedish version : Upptäck symmetri! (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1998).
- 4.
At this time, my book was already in production: I. Hargittai, The Road to Stockholm : Nobel Prizes , Science , and Scientists (Oxford University Press , 2002, 2003).
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Hargittai, I. (2020). Torvard C. Laurent. In: Mosaic of a Scientific Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34766-6_23
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