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A CAREER IN THEORETICAL PHYSICS
by P W Anderson (Princeton University)
P W Anderson was educated at Harvard, with a brief hiatus 1943 – 45 for war work. From 1949 – 1984 he was associated with the AT&T Bell Laboratories, but also held a number of temporary or part-time academic positions: 1953 – 54 Fulbright scholar, University of Tokyo; 1961 – 62 Overseas Fellow Churchill College Cambridge; 1967 – 75 “Visiting Professor”, Cambridge University, 1975 — present Joseph Henry Professor, Princeton. He is now spending a year as Eastman Professor, Balliol College, Oxford. In addition to the Nobel Prize, his honors include the Heinemann prize of the Gottingen Academy and the Guthrie medal of the IOP among other awards; also a membership of academies including the Royal Society, the Japan Academy, the NAS and the American Philosophical Society. Among distinguished lectureships he has held are the London, Regents' (UCSD), Loeb (Harvard), John and Abigail Van Vleck (Minn.) and Bethe lectureships.
Theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson has been described as one of the most imaginative of condensed matter physicists working today. His achievements have not merely constituted significant discoveries in their own right, but have also frequently set the agenda for the work of others. His pioneering contributions include the Anderson model of magnetic impurities and the concept of localisation, both of which were mentioned in his Nobel Prize citation. He also worked on the study of spin glasses, the fluctuating valence problem and superexchange. He predicted the existence of superfluidity in He-3 and provided a microscopic explanation, and was involved in the discovery of the Josephson effect. The understanding of topics as diverse as the Higgs mechanism, pulsar glitches, high Tc superconductivity, flux creep and flow in superconducting magnets and the solution of the Kondo problem has benefited from his contributions.
This volume contains a discriminating selection of the many topics on which Philip Anderson has worked. Some of the papers included are now hard to find elsewhere, and each has been embellished with commentary on how they came to be written. Anderson has also provided an entertaining introduction setting out his philosophy of what is important in science.
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