After graduation, Kolle decided to study physics at nearby Saarland University, which he chose for the opportunity to cross other borders. Later, a teacher in high school, Gunnar Pietzko, sparked Kolle’s curiosity about physics, with demonstrations of prisms and coupled pendulums. He came back from that trip with a souvenir: a simple crystal-growing kit, which kickstarted an interest in chemistry and science. “Gawking at the display window of a toy store, it blew my mind that kids on the other side of the wall had things like Mickey Mouse and Matchbox cars.” “I was 7 years old our parents put my brother and me in the car and we drove across the border,” Kolle recalls. In 1989, shortly after the Berlin Wall came down, he remembers crossing into West Germany for the first time. Kolle was born and raised in Gera, a city in former East Germany, where his parents worked as chemists. “It’s thrilling to take a peek at the many stunning examples of structural color in nature and ask how we can use knowledge about nature’s ways to play with light to give functionality to materials in novel ways.” In fact, these colors are way more brilliant than what can be achieved with pigments alone,” says Kolle, who recently received tenure. “If done right, materials can be intrinsically colored just by their structure, without adding a chemical pigment or dye. Just as butterflies reflect the whole spectrum of colors without any inherent pigments or dyes, Kolle envisions materials such as fabrics, fibers, and fluids that can be engineered to generate colors without chemicals. He and his students are designing materials, inspired by nature, that exhibit advanced optical functions, including color-changing sheets and fibers that can be integrated into pressure-monitoring bandages or tied into strength-testing knots, as well as fluid droplets that amplify the rainbow. Kolle, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, is diving into the microstructure of butterfly wings and other optically interesting organisms in search of ways to replicate, and even improve upon, their structural, light-bending effects. The insects’ iridescence is a result of “structural color” rather than pigments or dyes: A single wing is layered with hundreds of thousands of microscopic scales that act as tiny reflectors, bouncing light from various angles and depths, to give butterflies their signature color and shimmer. For Mathias Kolle, the wings of a butterfly are a window into a better material world.
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