Madeleine Durand-Charre gained her Docteur-??s-Sciences degree at the Institut National Polytechnique in Grenoble, where she spent the remainder of her career as a teacher and research worker in the field of structural metallurgy. Her special interests concern the fundamental aspects of phase equilibria and their relationship to the microstructure of complex commercial alloys. Due to her combined teaching and research activities, one of her permanent preoccupations is to explain the mechanisms involved in the formation of microstructures and to illustrate them with the aid of examples either f...