Enthusiasms and Realities in Advanced Materials
- PDF / 1,021,639 Bytes
- 4 Pages / 604.8 x 806.4 pts Page_size
- 66 Downloads / 229 Views
T.A. Read Memorial Lecture Thomas A. Read (1913-1966) was the head of the D e p a r t m e n t of Mining, Metallurgy, and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Illinois from 1954 to 1966. He is renowned for his theory on the crystallography of martensitic phase transformations. Following his death his colleagues a n d former s t u d e n t s established a fund to support periodic lectures by distinguished scientists and engineers in his r e m e m b r a n c e . Five T.A. Read Memorial Lectures have been presented to date. The 1987 T.A. Read Memorial Lecture published here was presented April 15, 1987 at the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL. Tom Read arrived at Columbia University on the same day that I did in 1948. He was a new professor in the School of Mines and I was a new graduate student. He was more than just a new professor. He was exceptional for that time. His father, T.T. Read, had been famous as an archeological metallurgist and professor at Columbia when the School of Mines was the premier school of its kind in the country. A measure of its eminence is that Irving Langmuir chose to study there rather than in a standard chemistry department. The y o u n g e r Tom Read h a d studied p h y s i c s at C o l u m b i a u n d e r S h i r l e y Quimby, one of the few solid-state physics professors of the time (pre-transistor). After graduation he worked at the Frankford Arsenal and at the W e s t i n g h o u s e Research Laboratories, where he and Frederick Seitz wrote their definitive review of the mechanisms of the plastic deformation of solids. When he came back to Columbia as a professor, Tom Read's physics background made him almost unique among metallurgy professors. And, he had the zeal of a crusader — he was determined to teach fundamental knowledge rather than recipes. His techniques were often novel. For example, one semester we were to learn about ferromagnetism. But he had trouble finding a good American text, so he announced that we would study both ferromagnetism and German using the famous book by Becker and Doring called Ferromagnetisms. As a result, I have never
forgotten the essentials of ferromagnetism. This became important for me many years later when my laboratory at Allied Chemical pioneered the revolution in soft magnetic materials brought about by metallic glasses. Although I studied surface effects on the plasticity of crystals, some of my fellow students at Columbia studied martensitic transformations in Au-Cd and In-Tl alloys, now known as shape-memory alloys. Tom Read's seminal work on the crystallographic theory of martensitic transformations derived from the experimental studies that were going on.
Opportunities in the materials area lie principally in materials systems, and much less in components made from differentiated individual materials. I was pleased recently when I opened a copy of Khatchaturyan's treatise on the theory of phase transformations to find that the first item on the reference list is the classic paper by Wechsler, Lieberman, and Read on the theory of ha
Data Loading...
