I told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me.

Me as president would not be like anybody else as president. Everyone does the job differently.

I think the main lesson that I have learned is that a good scientist is a humble scientist who is open-minded to listen to other scientists when they discover something.

The message from the Technion when I was a student was: 'You will be so good that when you graduate, everyone will want to hire you.'

Crystallographers believed in X-ray results, which are of course very accurate. But the x-rays are limited, and electron microscopy filled the gap, and so the discovery of quasicrystals could have been discovered only by electron microscopy, and the community of crystallographers, for several years, was not willing to listen.

I hope that I have had some effect on the fact that Israel is a start-up nation.