David J. Thouless

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.

David Thouless FRS
David Thouless in 1995
Born	David James Thouless (1934-09-21)21 September 1934 Bearsden, Scotland
Died	6 April 2019(2019-04-06) (aged 84) Cambridge, England
Nationality	British
Citizenship	United Kingdom
Alma mater	University of Cambridge (BA) Cornell University (PhD)
Known for	Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless transition Thouless energy KTHNY theory Topological quantum numbers
Spouse	Margaret Elizabeth Scrase ​ ​ (m. 1958)​
Children	Three
Awards	Maxwell Medal and Prize (1973) Fellow of the Royal Society (1979) 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)
Scientific career
Fields	Condensed matter physics
Institutions	University of Washington University of California, Berkeley University of Birmingham Yale University
Thesis	The application of perturbation methods to the theory of nuclear matter (1958)
Doctoral advisor	Hans Bethe
Notable students	J. Michael Kosterlitz (postdoc)

Born on 21 September 1934 in Bearsden, Scotland to English parents, Priscilla (Gorton) Thouless, an English teacher, and Robert Thouless a psychologist and broadcaster. David Thouless was educated at St Faith's School then 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. He obtained his PhD at Cornell University, where Hans Bethe was his doctoral advisor.

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

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

Academic papers

Selected papers include:

Books

Awards and honours

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

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

• Hofstadter's butterfly
• Single-electron transistor