A volume which includes entries on quasicrystals icosahedral packing other packing
considerations extended structures data treatment and data mining is presented by luminaries
from the crystallography community. Several of the contributions are from the schools of such
trend-setting crystallographers as J. Desmond Bernal and Aleksandr I. Kitaigorodskii.
Internationally renowned scientists contributed such as Tom L. Blundell Johann Jacob
Burckhardt John L. Finney Jenny P. Glusker Nobel laureate Herbert A. Hauptman the 2014
Ewald-Prize winner A. Janner Aminoff-Prize winner Isabella Karle Nobel laureate Jerome Karle
Buckley-Prize winner Alan L. Mackay Ewald-Prize winner David Sayre Vladimir Shevchenko and
J. Fraser Stoddart. A few frontier topics dominate the selected material. Pioneers of the
direct methods describe the phase problem and how it was solved including the mathematical
approach and the utilization of experience with gas-phase electron diffraction. The reviews by
Herbert Hauptman Jerome and Isabella Karle and David Sayre reach to the present day in
assessing the possibilities of X-ray crystallography. Another focus topic is the investigation
of systems that are outside the so-called classical system of crystals. They include
quasicrystals imperfect and very small crystals supramolecular species crystal structures
without lattice clusters nanomaterials among others. Application of synchrotron and
cryoprotection techniques the free-electron laser flash technique and others are mentioned in
addition to X-ray crystallography. The relationship between structural and materials properties
are examined and uncovered. The broader topics of the so-called generalized crystallography
include polymers clusters polydisperse chain assemblies and giant icosahedral fullerenes.
There are some key contributions related to the structural investigation of biological
macromolecules.
