This Special Issue of Philosophical Magazine Letters is dedicated to the memory of Professor Manuel Amaral Fortes who died on 22 April 2007. Manuel Fortes was born in Lisbon in 1938. He graduated in Chemical Engineering at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in 1961. Later he spent 3 years in Cambridge from where he obtained his PhD degree in 1968. He retained a strong affection for Cambridge throughout his life. After a period at the Physics and Nuclear Laboratory, he went to Mozambique where he began a teaching career at the University of Lourenço Marques. Returning to Portugal, he joined the Physics Department of the IST in Lisbon and became one of the founders of the Materials Science Department, where he became full professor. For several years, he was the Head of this Department.
As a talented scientist, he was invited to collaborate with the Portuguese Science Foundation (JNICT and FCT) and became a member of the Portuguese Academy of Sciences. He published over 200 papers in the field of materials science, most of them in leading international journals, and made significant scientific contributions to the fields of material structure, defects such as grain boundaries and material properties. He greatly enjoyed dissecting problems of topology and structure. In the 1980s, he started his work on cellular materials, particularly cork, one of his country's most famous products. In recognition of his work, he received two scientific awards (Gulbenkian, 1989 and Boa Esperança, 1994). He edited several books and the last one was on cork. Although he retained an interest in materials science in general, he focused his last years of research on solid and liquid foams seen as cellular materials. He was one of the initiators of the establishment of a research community for physics of foams, participating in the first European network devoted to such research.
Manuel Fortes possessed great enthusiasm for his work and shared his knowledge and experience with his collaborators. He was warm, friendly and full of humour but he will be remembered most for his intelligence and wisdom.
The articles in this Special Issue have been contributed by friends and colleagues who share the same passion and enthusiasm for the fields of research which so enthralled him.
Fatima Vaz and Emilia Rosa
ICEMS
Instituto Superior Técnico
Lisbon
Portugal
E-mail: [email protected]