A retrospective view of selected advances in ferrous physical metallurgy

A personal retrospective view is offered of a few developments in experimental and computational methods that have influenced our thinking about this classical field. The focus here is on ferrous physical metallurgy, in part because of the rich historical and cultural aspects of the field, in part because of the economic and ecological impacts of the steel industry, and in part because of a fascination with the myriad ways that combinations of material chemistry and processing can be used to influence the microstructure and microstructure-related properties of these versatile materials.