Kaufman, Larry

As we have repeatedly seen in this chapter, proponents of computer simulation in materials science had a good deal of scepticism to overcome, from physicists in particular, in the early days. A striking example of sustained scepticism overcome, at length, by a resolute champion is to be found in the history of CALPHAD, an acronym denoting CALculation of PHAse Diagrams. The decisive champion was an American metallurgist, Larry Kaufman. 

At the time Meijering published his research, Larry Kaufman was working for his doctorate at MIT with a charismatic steel metallurgist. Professor Morris Cohen, and they undertook some simple equilibrium calculations directed at practical problems of the steel industry. From the end of the 1950s, Kaufman directed his... 

Mats H. Hillert (b. 1924) and Lawrence (Larry) Kaufman (b. 1931) studied together at M. I. T. Kaufman (right photo) received his D.Sc. in physical metallurgy in 1955, and Hillert (left photo) his D.Sc. in 1956. Hillert became a research associate with the Swedish Institute of Metals Research in 1948. In 1961, he was appointed professor of physical metallurgy at the Royal Institute... 

Photo courtesy of Larry Kaufman. Reproduced with permission.)... 

The MoRu project, which is described in Papers III, IV, and V, started when professor Larry Kaufman contacted us about the possibility to cooperate with a project intended to investigate the differences between CALPHAD interpolation techniques [117] and ab initio methods. One of these differences are the structural energy differences, which usually agrees very well, but for some elements, Nb, Mo, Ru, Rh, for example, the difference between CALPHAD and ab initio values is very big. The idea was to start from the equation for the mixing enthalpy of the alloy ... 

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