Jan van der Merwe and the theory of epitaxy
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Johannes (Jan) Hendrik van der Merwe was born on February 28, 1922 in Humpatha, Angola, where his grandparents had gone to farm. The land was good, but, just as the British colonists regarded it as their duty to turn all mankind, black or white, into Englishmen, so the Portuguese colonists aimed to make everyone a Portuguese. This was not tolerable to the Afrikaner, so, when Jan was seven years old, his parents decided to move south again. With their cattle herded and their goods in an ox wagon, they traveled to the Kunene River, the border of German South-West Africa, now Namibia. Here, they had to sell their cattle cheaply, and were taken by truck, ox-wagon and all, to a preliminary settlement near Outjo, where Jan had his first, but very brief—2 weeks—experience of attending school. They bought more cattle, and Jan and his elder brother herded them to Gobabis, and back to Otjiwarongo. Here, for the first time, Jan attended real school, five farm schools in all, first in tents, that were on occasion blown over by thunderstorms, and then in buildings. Despite or perhaps because of this late start, Jan was ready for high school, where he was a boarder in Windhoek. There were two schools, one for Germans and one for the rest, where the principal was a Scotsman, a Mr. Anderson. The school hostel was an abandoned German fort. From an early age, Jan had wanted to be a scientist or an engineer, and he qualified to enter the University of Stellenbosch as an engineering student. This university, the cultural center of the Afrikaner people, has the charmingly colonial title of The Victoria University of Stellenbosch. The engineering course at that time consisted of a 3-year foundation bachelors degree in mathematics and physical science, which Jan achieved with distinction in 1943, followed by 2 years of professional study. At this time, Jan decided to switch from engineering to pure science, and he was awarded his master’s degree in applied mathematics, with distinction, in 1945. He was awarded a Queen Victoria Stipendium, which would help to finance his studies for a Ph.D. At that time, there were two notable physicists in South Africa, the British crystallographer R.W. James and the South African geophysicist Basil Schonland. Toward the end of the Second World War, Smuts asked Schonland to create the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, roughly the equivalent of the United States
F.R.N. NABARRO, Professor Emeritus, is with the Department of Physics, University of the Witwatersrand, WITS 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa. This article is based on a presentation in the symposium “Interfacial Dislocations: Symposium in Honor of J.H. van der Merwe on the 50th Anniversary of His Discovery,” as part of the 2000 TMS Fall Meeting, October 11–12, 2000, in St. Louis, Missouri, sponsored under the auspices of ASM International, Materials Science Critical Technology Sector, Structures. METALLURGICAL AND MATERIALS TRANSACTIONS A
National Bureau of Standards and National Research Council combined. Dr A.J.A.
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