The Legacy of John W. Cahn

The soft materials community has a number of consequential intersections with John Cahn's long effort in materials theory and modeling. I have been assigned the challenging task of representing the remainder of John's influence on materials research, that is, on "hard materials." John's impact is so large and diverse in this space that the task is gloriously doomed to failure. Instead I will try and provide a brief taste of John's career, particularly his time at NIST, and hopefully shed light on John's motivations to develop some of his ideas, and how those ideas often anticipated or underpinned entire sub-disciplines of theoretical and computational materials science, especially as they motivated my own research in mesoscale materials modeling.