Bernd T. Matthias was my academic grandfather as he was thesis advisor my thesis advisor, Robert N Shelton. I was in the same room as Matthias only a few times and never had so much as a conversation with him. Even so he had a strong influence on me, and I'm grateful for that. I thought I would put down some of the stories I remember about him. He was a remarkable scientist with encyclopedic knowledge of the properties of materials and uncanny scientific instincts, which I hope to illustrate here. For a more complete biography see this link:

    https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/5406/chapter/14

My first indirect encounter with Matthias

I joined Shelton's solid state physics group in Ames, IA in 1978 to study superconductivity and magnetism. Bob (I always called him Bob and he never corrected me though everyone else called him Robert) had just arrived in Ames and was building a lab from empty rooms with concrete floors. I felt I needed a lot of hands on experience and saw the required building of equipment as an opportunity. 

About the first real project Bob put me on involved the family of ternary Rare Earth Rhodium Borides typified by YRh₄B₄. Before Matthias physicists had studied superconductivity in nearly every element, and nearly every binary compound consisting of any combination of two elements. The prevailing view was that compounds of three elements (called ternary compounds) would be chemically more complex but exhibit no new physics compared to the simpler materials. Matthias had shown that view was wrong, so as I was getting started the new area of ternary superconductivity was just getting going.

Today I declare this website upgraded from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10.  In most ways the upgrade went smouthy, and certainly was easier than previous major version upgrades.

Still, the Theme was using isn't available in Drupal 10, so i had to choose and configure a new theme. That was harder than it should be IMHO.

Harder was getting Quotes to work as I'd like. Formatting was tRicky.

My impression is that the Drupal community has moved much more to large, enterprise sites rather than the smaller sites lIke mine. Frankly, i would go with WordPress if i were starting out today, I'm even tempted to make a static archive of the current  site and starting over with WordPress. 

But for now, this is where I am.