Biography:David J. Thouless

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Short description: British physicist (1934–2019)


David Thouless

FRS
DavidThouless 1995 UW.jpg
David Thouless in 1995
Born
David James Thouless

(1934-09-21)21 September 1934
Bearsden, Scotland
Died6 April 2019(2019-04-06) (aged 84)
Cambridge, England
NationalityBritish
CitizenshipUnited Kingdom
Spouse(s)
Margaret Elizabeth Scrase (m. 1958)
ChildrenThree[1]
Scientific career
FieldsCondensed matter physics
ThesisThe application of perturbation methods to the theory of nuclear matter (1958)
Doctoral advisorHans Bethe[2]
Notable studentsJ. Michael Kosterlitz (postdoc)[1]

David James Thouless FRS[3][4] (/ˈθaʊlɛs/; 21 September 1934 – 6 April 2019[5][6][7]) was a British condensed-matter physicist.[8] He was the winner of the 1990 Wolf Prize and a laureate of the 2016 Nobel Prize for physics along with F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.[9]

Education

Born on 21 September 1934 in Bearsden, Scotland [10] to English parents, Priscilla (Gorton) Thouless, an English teacher, and psychologist and broadcaster, Robert Thouless,[11] David Thouless was educated at Winchester College and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate student of Trinity Hall, Cambridge.[1] He obtained his PhD at Cornell University,[5][12] where Hans Bethe was his doctoral advisor.[2][13]

Career and research

Thouless was a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, and also worked in the physics department from 1958 to 1959, giving a course on atomic physics.[7][14][15] He was the first director of studies in physics at Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1961–1965, professor of mathematical physics at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom in 1965–1978,[16] and professor of applied science at Yale University from 1979 to 1980,[15] before becoming a professor of physics at the University of Washington[17] in Seattle in 1980.[16] Thouless made many theoretical contributions to the understanding of extended systems of atoms and electrons, and of nucleons.[18][19][7] He also worked on superconductivity phenomena, properties of nuclear matter, and excited collective motions within nuclei.[18][19][7]

Thouless made many important contributions to the theory of many-body problems.[7] For atomic nuclei, he cleared up the concept of 'rearrangement energy' and derived an expression for the moment of inertia of deformed nuclei.[7] In statistical mechanics, he contributed many ideas to the understanding of ordering, including the concept of 'topological ordering'.[7] Other important results relate to localised electron states in disordered lattices.[3][7]

Academic papers

Selected papers[20] include:

Books

Awards and honours

Thouless was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1979,[3] a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1986), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences (1995).[21] Among his awards are the Wolf Prize for Physics (1990),[22] the Paul Dirac Medal of the Institute of Physics (1993), the Lars Onsager Prize[23] of the American Physical Society (2000), and the Nobel Prize in Physics (2016).[19][7]

Personal life

Thouless married Margaret Elizabeth Scrase in 1958 and together they had three children.[1] In 2016, Thouless was reported to be suffering from dementia.[24] He died on 6 April 2019 in Cambridge, aged 84.[6]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Anon (2016). "BBC Radio 4 profile: Professor David J Thouless". London: BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07x12m3. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 David J. Thouless at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Anon (1979). "Professor David Thouless FRS". London: royalsociety.org. https://royalsociety.org/people/david-thouless-12410/.  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
    All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." –"Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". https://royalsociety.org/about-us/terms-conditions-policies/. 
  4. ↑ Leggett, Anthony J. (2022). "David James Thouless. 21 September 1934—6 April 2019". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 72: 337–358. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2021.0049. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.2021.0049. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Thouless, Prof. David James". Who's Who. 2016 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. https://www.ukwhoswho.com/view/article/oupww/whoswho/U37668.  (subscription or UK public library membership required) (Subscription content?)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Professor David Thouless 1934–2019". Trinity Hall, Cambridge. 6 April 2019. https://www.trinhall.cam.ac.uk/news/professor-david-thouless-1934-2019/. 
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 "David J. Thouless Facts". Nobel Prize.org. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2016/thouless/facts/. 
  8. ↑ "Physicist Thouless to give two talks at Lab". http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/newsbulletin/2004/04/23/text04.shtml. , Los Alamos National Laboratory
  9. ↑ The international who's who 1991–92. Europa Publ.. 25 July 1991. ISBN 9780946653706. https://books.google.com/books?id=Z4PN4GnsrSgC&q=%22Thouless,+david+james%22+1934. 
  10. ↑ Sturrock, Laura (5 October 2016). "Bearsden scientist is awarded Nobel prize in Physics". Kirkintilloch Herald. http://www.kirkintilloch-herald.co.uk/news/bearsden-scientist-is-awarded-nobel-prize-in-physics-1-4249500. 
  11. ↑ David Thouless, 84, Dies; Nobel Laureate Cast Light on Matter New York Times, 2019-04-22.
  12. ↑ Thouless, David James (1958). The application of perturbation methods to the theory of nuclear matter (PhD thesis). Cornell University. OCLC 745509629.
  13. ↑ Lee, Sabine (8 April 2011). From Nuclei to Stars: Festschrift in Honor of Gerald E. Brown. World Scientific. ISBN 9789814329880. https://books.google.com/books?id=Ikrt42W9IOgC&pg=PA43. 
  14. ↑ "UW Professor Emeritus David J. Thouless wins Nobel Prize in physics for exploring exotic states of matter | UW Today" (in en). http://www.washington.edu/news/2016/10/04/uw-professor-emeritus-david-j-thouless-wins-nobel-prize-in-physics-for-exploring-exotic-states-of-matter/. 
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 "David Thouless". aip.org. https://www.aip.org/history/acap/biographies/bio.jsp?thoulessd. 
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 "Two former Birmingham scientists awarded Nobel Prize for Physics". University of Birmingham. 4 October 2016. http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2016/10/former-birmingham-scientists-nobel-prize.aspx. 
  17. ↑ Nijs, Marcel den (2019-05-31). "David Thouless (1934–2019)" (in en). Science 364 (6443): 835. doi:10.1126/science.aax9125. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 31147511. Bibcode: 2019Sci...364..835D. 
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016". https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2016/summary/. 
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 Gibney, Elizabeth; Castelvecchi, Davide (2016). "Physics of 2D exotic matter wins Nobel: British-born theorists recognized for work on topological phases". Nature (London: Springer Nature) 538 (7623): 18. doi:10.1038/nature.2016.20722. PMID 27708331. Bibcode: 2016Natur.538...18G. 
  20. ↑ David J. Thouless publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (Subscription content?)
  21. ↑ "David Thouless". http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/67745.html. 
  22. ↑ David J. Thouless Winner of Wolf Prize in Physics – 1990 on the official website of Wolf Foundation
  23. ↑ "2018 Stanley Corrsin Award Recipient". https://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes/prizerecipient.cfm. 
  24. ↑ Knapton, Sarah (4 October 2016). "British scientists win Nobel prize in physics for work so baffling it had to be described using bagels". The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/04/british-scientists-win-nobel-prize-in-physics-for-work-so-baffli/. 

External links

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