Thermodynamics and Phase Transformations

As a professor Mats taught several generations of Swedish metallurgists the most up to date knowledge in the fundamentals of physical metallurgy. He launched the graduate teaching on the subject and acted as the main supervisor of more than 30 doctors which are now active in Swedish industry or academia worldwide.

Mats Hillert is a fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is also a fellow of ASM International and a Fellow of Met. Soc. AIME (TMS). His list of awards is impressive and includes, to mention only a few, R.F. Mehl medalist (Met. Soc. AIME), Bakhuis Roozeboom Gold Medal (Royal Acad. Netherland), Acta Metallurgica Gold Medal, Murakami Gold Medal (Japan Inst. Metals, Japan), Björkén award (Uppsala University, Sweden), Hume-Rothery Award (TMS, USA).

For over half a century, Mats Hillert has contributed greatly to the science of materials. He is widely known and respected as an innovator and an educator, a scientist with an enormous breadth of interest and depth of insight. In acknowledgment of his many contributions, a conference was held in Stockholm in December 2004 to mark his eightieth birthday.

A brief reading of the topics of the selected papers and their introductions reveals something of their range and depth. Several early selections (for example, those on "The Role of Interfacial Energy during Solid State Phase Transformations", and "A Solid-Solution Model for Inhomogeneous Systems") contained seminal material that established Mats as a leading figure in the study of phase transformations in solids. Others established his presence in the areas of solidification and computational thermodynamics. A review of his full publication list shows that he has consistently built upon those early foundational papers, and maintained a dominant position in those fields. Although many of his contributions have been of a theoretical nature, he has always maintained a close contact with experiment, and indeed, he has designed numerous critical experiments.