Biography:David J. Thouless
David Thouless | |
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David Thouless in 1995 | |
Born | David James Thouless 21 September 1934 Bearsden, Scotland |
Died | 6 April 2019 Cambridge, England | (aged 84)
Nationality | British |
Citizenship | United Kingdom |
Alma mater |
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Known for | |
Spouse(s) | Margaret Elizabeth Scrase (m. 1958) |
Children | Three[1] |
Awards | |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Condensed matter physics |
Institutions | |
Thesis | The application of perturbation methods to the theory of nuclear matter (1958) |
Doctoral advisor | Hans Bethe[4] |
Notable students | J. Michael Kosterlitz (postdoc)[1] |
David James Thouless FRS[2][5] (/ˈθaʊlɛs/; 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:
- Kosterlitz, J. M.; Thouless, D. J. (1973). "Ordering, metastability and phase transitions in two-dimensional systems". Journal of Physics C: Solid State Physics 6 (7): 1181–1203. doi:10.1088/0022-3719/6/7/010. ISSN 0022-3719. Bibcode: 1973JPhC....6.1181K. http://www.physics.uci.edu/~taborek/publications/other/jcv6i7p1181.pdf.
- Thouless, D. J.; Kohmoto, M.; Nightingale, M. P.; den Nijs, M. (1982). "Quantized Hall Conductance in a Two-Dimensional Periodic Potential". Physical Review Letters 49 (6): 405–408. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.49.405. ISSN 0031-9007. Bibcode: 1982PhRvL..49..405T.
Books
- Thouless, D. J. (1998). Topological Quantum Numbers in Nonrelativistic Physics. Singapore: World Scientific. ISBN 981-02-2900-3. OCLC 38431218. https://books.google.com/books?id=4bhgDQAAQBAJ.
- Thouless, D. J. (1961). The Quantum Mechanics of Many-Body Systems (1st ed.). New York: Academic Press. ISBN 9780486493572. OCLC 901492152. https://books.google.com/books?id=GaD6AQAAQBAJ.
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
- ↑ 1.0 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.
- ↑ 2.0 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:
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/.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 David J. Thouless at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ 6.0 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)
- ↑ 7.0 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/.
- ↑ 8.0 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/.
- ↑ "Physicist Thouless to give two talks at Lab". http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/newsbulletin/2004/04/23/text04.shtml., Los Alamos National Laboratory
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ David Thouless, 84, Dies; Nobel Laureate Cast Light on Matter New York Times, 2019-04-22.
- ↑ Thouless, David James (1958). The application of perturbation methods to the theory of nuclear matter (PhD thesis). Cornell University. OCLC 745509629.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ "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/.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 "David Thouless". aip.org. https://www.aip.org/history/acap/biographies/bio.jsp?thoulessd.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ 19.0 19.1 "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016". https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2016/summary/.
- ↑ 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. Bibcode: 2016Natur.538...18G.
- ↑ David J. Thouless publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (Subscription content?)
- ↑ "David Thouless". http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/67745.html.
- ↑ David J. Thouless Winner of Wolf Prize in Physics – 1990 on the official website of Wolf Foundation
- ↑ "2018 Stanley Corrsin Award Recipient". https://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes/prizerecipient.cfm.
- ↑ 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
Original source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David J. Thouless.
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