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ICMS welcome Priya Subramanian for a talk on thermodynamics, alloys and the discovery of quasicrystals. This Public Lecture was part of the New Directions in Classical Density Functional Theory workshop.

John Werner Cahn was a leading figure in material science and had a distinguished career spanning four decades. He thought that 'Thermodynamics strictly is the science which tells one what is not possible' and wielded it extensively to understand and predict diverse physical phenomena.

In this Public Lecture, Priya Subramanian discusses Cahn's ideas on how to control the properties of alloys, and his work on understanding how materials solidify. She focuses on the role that Cahn played in the discovery of quasicrystals, and discusses how the existence of quasicrystals was received by the scientific community, and how Cahn helped shaped this reception.

Priya Subramanian is a Hooke Research fellow at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. She works in the areas of pattern formation with current focus on self-assembly of soft matter during crystallisation. She enjoys science communication and has previously spoken at science cafes, schools and at the British Science Festival in 2019.