While his many successes with the SFA can be attributed to a rare combination of physical insight and great skill as an experimentalist, Israelachvili also liked to develop theoretical models, and one of his most important contributions was in the area of membrane biophysics when in 1976 he conceived the idea of a simple parameter based on the geometry of surface active molecules, later called the ‘surfactant packing parameter’. This allows prediction of the type of surfactant aggregate (micelle, vesicle, bilayer membrane and so on) that molecules can form. In 1985, the first edition of his book Intermolecular and Surface Forces was published. With its succinct and accessible style, this text (now in its third edition) has become a standard reference for students and researchers in many areas of materials science and engineering.

Born on 19 August 1944 in Israel, Israelachvili died on 20 September 2018 in Santa Barbara, California. He studied physics at the University of Cambridge, first as an undergraduate and then for his PhD with Professor David Tabor (whose gentle, inclusive and egalitarian style of supervision he inherited). Tabor’s lab had been developing methods to measure forces acting between molecularly smooth mica surfaces. A finely developed form of optical interferometry was adapted to measure the separation between two mica surfaces with an accuracy of 0.1–0.2 nm. Israelachvili made further refinements of the experimental methods, leading to a landmark paper in 1972 on the measurement of van der Waals forces in air and vacuum.

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