Biography:David J. Thouless

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Short description: British physicist (1934–2019)


David Thouless

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
Alma mater
Known for
Spouse(s)
Margaret Elizabeth Scrase (m. 1958)
ChildrenThree[1]
Awards
  • Maxwell Medal and Prize (1973)
  • Fellow of the Royal Society (1979)[2]
  • Holweck Prize (1980)
  • Fritz London Memorial Prize (1984)
  • Wolf Prize (1990)
  • Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1995)
  • Lars Onsager Prize (2000)
  • Nobel Prize in Physics (2016)[3]
Scientific career
FieldsCondensed matter physics
Institutions
ThesisThe application of perturbation methods to the theory of nuclear matter (1958)
Doctoral advisorHans Bethe[4]
Notable studentsJ. Michael Kosterlitz (postdoc)[1]

David James Thouless FRS[2][5] (/ˈθlɛs/; 21 September 1934 – 6 April 2019[6][7][8]) was a British condensed-matter physicist.[9] 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.[10]

Education

Born on 21 September 1934 in Bearsden, Scotland [11] to English parents, Priscilla (Gorton) Thouless, an English teacher, and Robert Thouless a psychologist and broadcaster.[12] 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,[6][13] where Hans Bethe was his doctoral advisor.[4][14]

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.[8][15][16] 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,[17] and professor of applied science at Yale University from 1979 to 1980,[16] before becoming a professor of physics at the University of Washington[18] in Seattle in 1980.[17] Thouless made many theoretical contributions to the understanding of extended systems of atoms and electrons, and of nucleons.[19][20][8] He also worked on superconductivity phenomena, properties of nuclear matter, and excited collective motions within nuclei.[19][20][8]

Thouless made many important contributions to the theory of many-body problems.[8] For atomic nuclei, he cleared up the concept of 'rearrangement energy' and derived an expression for the moment of inertia of deformed nuclei.[8] In statistical mechanics, he contributed many ideas to the understanding of ordering, including the concept of 'topological ordering'.[8] Other important results relate to localised electron states in disordered lattices.[2][8]

Academic papers

Selected papers[21] include:

Books

Awards and honours

Thouless was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1979,[2] 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).[22] Among his awards are the Wolf Prize for Physics (1990),[23] the Paul Dirac Medal of the Institute of Physics (1993), the Lars Onsager Prize[24] of the American Physical Society (2000), and the Nobel Prize in Physics (2016).[20][8]

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.[25] He died on 6 April 2019 in Cambridge, aged 84.[7]

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 2.2 2.3 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:
  3. Devlin, Hannah; Sample, Ian (4 October 2016). "British trio win Nobel prize in physics 2016 for work on exotic states of matter – live". https://www.theguardian.com/science/live/2016/oct/04/nobel-prize-in-physics-2016-to-be-announced-live. 
  4. 4.0 4.1 David J. Thouless at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. 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. 
  6. 6.0 6.1 ",". 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)
  7. 7.0 7.1 "Professor David Thouless 1934–2019". Trinity Hall, Cambridge. 6 April 2019. https://www.trinhall.cam.ac.uk/news/professor-david-thouless-1934-2019/. 
  8. 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 "David J. Thouless Facts". Nobel Prize.org. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2016/thouless/facts/. 
  9. "Physicist Thouless to give two talks at Lab". http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/newsbulletin/2004/04/23/text04.shtml. , Los Alamos National Laboratory
  10. 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. 
  11. 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. 
  12. David Thouless, 84, Dies; Nobel Laureate Cast Light on Matter New York Times, 2019-04-22.
  13. Thouless, David James (1958). The application of perturbation methods to the theory of nuclear matter (PhD thesis). Cornell University. OCLC 745509629.
  14. 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. 
  15. "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/. 
  16. 16.0 16.1 "David Thouless". aip.org. https://www.aip.org/history/acap/biographies/bio.jsp?thoulessd. 
  17. 17.0 17.1 "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. 
  18. 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. Bibcode2019Sci...364..835D. 
  19. 19.0 19.1 "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016". https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2016/summary/. 
  20. 20.0 20.1 20.2 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. Bibcode2016Natur.538...18G. 
  21. David J. Thouless publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (Subscription content?)
  22. "David Thouless". http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/67745.html. 
  23. David J. Thouless Winner of Wolf Prize in Physics – 1990 on the official website of Wolf Foundation
  24. "2018 Stanley Corrsin Award Recipient". https://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes/prizerecipient.cfm. 
  25. 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

  • Miss nobel-id as parameter