, Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

) is a condensed matter physicist

Physicist

A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...

 and Wolf Prize winner.

Thouless earned his PhD at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 under Hans Bethe

Hans Bethe

Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German-American nuclear physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. A versatile theoretical physicist, Bethe also made important contributions to quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics, solid-state physics and...

. He was a professor of mathematical physics at Birmingham University in the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 before becoming a professor of physics at the University of Washington

University of Washington

University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...

 in Seattle in 1980. Thouless has made many theoretical contributions to the understanding of extended systems of atoms and electrons, and of nucleons. Areas that his work has impacted include superconductivity phenomena, properties of nuclear matter, and excited collective motions within nuclei.

Thouless is a Fellow of the Royal Society

Royal Society

The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...

, Fellow of the American Physical Society

American Physical Society

The American Physical Society is the world's second largest organization of physicists, behind the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. The Society publishes more than a dozen scientific journals, including the world renowned Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, and organizes more than 20...

, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences

United States National Academy of Sciences

The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...

. Among his many awards are the Wolf Prize for Physics (1990), the Paul Dirac Medal

Dirac Prize

The Dirac Prize is the name of four prominent awards in the field of theoretical physics, computational chemistry, and mathematics, awarded by different organizations, named in honour of Professor Paul Dirac, one of the great theoretical physicists of the 20th Century.- The Dirac Medal and Lecture...

 of the Institute of Physics

Institute of Physics

The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of around 40,000....

 (1993), and the Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society

American Physical Society

The American Physical Society is the world's second largest organization of physicists, behind the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. The Society publishes more than a dozen scientific journals, including the world renowned Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, and organizes more than 20...

 (2000).

Selected Publications

• J. M. Kosterlitz & D. J. Thouless, "Ordering, metastability and phase transitions in two-dimensional systems", Journal of Physics C: Solid State Physics, Vol. 6 pages 1181-1203 (1973)

• Topological Quantum Numbers in Nonrelativistic Physics, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte Ltd, 1998

• The quantum mechanics of many-body systems (Pure and applied physics series), Academic Press, 1972

External links

• David Thouless profile in the LANL Daily News Bulletin
• David James Thouless, University of Washington: 2000 Lars Onsager Prize Recipient (Americal Physical Society)