Abstract: is, I hope, appropriate in a paper reviewing recent advances in the field of recrystallization at a meeting celebrating the contributions and achievements of a distinguished scientist to start with a few personal comments. My first contact with Robert Cahn was in my final year of graduate research at Oxford when he visited the Department of Metallurgy, then headed by Professor William Hume-Rothery. Robert Cahn was not the first person outside the department with whom I was able to discuss my research, but he was able to offer to me what I subsequently saw him offer to many other scientists: (i) real enthusiasm for new ideas, (ii) innovative suggestions for new experiments and (iii) very strong encouragement to a young investigator. He followed this by providing real help in that he obtained for me, from the publishers of a major conference on recrystallization, (I) the prepublication set of the conference papers that I critically needed for my doctorate thesis. (2’ Three years later he encouraged me to apply for, and he subsequently appointed me to, a lectureship at Sussex University where he was establishing the first undergraduate and graduate programme in Materials Science in the U.K. The opportunity this allowed, to be in at the start of an exciting if short-lived experience of founding a new subject in a new university, was perhaps the most stimulating teaching experience in my life. Robert Cahn and I wrote, in 1983, an accounV3’ of the brief history of Materials Science at Sussex University from when it was founded in 1965 to its closure in 1982/3. There is no need here to say more about that experience other than to quote the following from the introduction: “Creating and building up a group which achieved a worldwide reputation was deeply rewarding for all of us, in spite of the emotional stresses of the final period”. In the early years at Sussex while Robert Cahn was continuing his interest in recrystallization with two excellent research students, Dr Manu Bhatiac4) and Dr Edmund0 Chojnowski,‘5) and producing several scholarly reviews of the topic,‘“9’ I was following
Publication Year: 1997
Publication Date: 1997-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 175
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