Sir Michael Berry | |
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Born | Michael Victor Berry 14 March 1941 Surrey, England, United Kingdom |
Alma mater | University of Exeter (BSc) University of St. Andrews (PhD) |
Known for | Berry phase Berry connection and curvature Berry–Robbins problem Berry–Tabor conjecture Weyl–Berry conjecture Quantum carpet Quantum chaos |
Awards | Maxwell Medal and Prize (1978) Fellow of the Royal Society (1982) Lilienfeld Prize (1990) Royal Medal (1990) IOP Dirac Medal (1990) Naylor Prize and Lectureship (1992) ICTP Dirac Medal (1996) Knight Bachelor (1996) Wolf Prize (1998) Ig Nobel prize (2000) Onsager Medal (2001) Pólya Prize (2005) Lorentz Medal (2014) |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | University of Bristol |
Thesis | The diffraction of light by ultrasound (1965) |
Doctoral advisor | Robert Balson Dingle [1] |
Doctoral students | Jenny Nelson Jonathan Keating |
Website | michaelberryphysics |
Sir Michael Victor Berry, FRS , FRSE , FRSA , HonFInstP (born 14 March 1941) is a British mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, England.
He is known for the Berry phase, a phenomenon observed e.g. in quantum mechanics and optics, as well as Berry connection and curvature. He specializes in semiclassical physics (asymptotic physics, quantum chaos), applied to wave phenomena in quantum mechanics and other areas such as optics.
Berry was brought up in a Jewish family and was the son of a London taxi driver and a dressmaker. [2] Berry earned a BSc in physics from the University of Exeter where he met his first wife (a sociology student with whom he had his first child) [3] and a PhD from the University of St. Andrews. [4] His thesis is titled The diffraction of light by ultrasound. [5]
He has spent his whole career at the University of Bristol. He was a research fellow, 1965–67; lecturer, 1967–74; reader, 1974–78; Professor of Physics, 1978–88; and Royal Society Research Professor 1988–2006. Since 2006, he has been Melville Wills Professor of Physics (Emeritus) at Bristol University. [6]
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: CS1 maint: postscript (link) [7] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1982 [9] and knighted in 1996. [10] From 2006 to 2012 he was editor of Proceedings of the Royal Society A .
Berry has been given the following prizes and awards: [11]
The Ig Nobel Prize is a satiric prize awarded annually since 1991 to celebrate ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. Its aim is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The name of the award is a pun on the Nobel Prize, which it parodies, and on the word ignoble.
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The Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester is one of the largest and most active physics departments in the UK, taking around 250 new undergraduates and 50 postgraduates each year, and employing more than 80 members of academic staff and over 100 research fellows and associates. The department is based on two sites: the Schuster Laboratory on Brunswick Street and the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in Cheshire, international headquarters of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
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Jonathan Peter Keating is a British mathematician. As of September 2019, he is the Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and from 2012 to 2019 was the Henry Overton Wills Professor of Mathematics at the University of Bristol, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Science (2009–2013). He has made contributions to applied mathematics and mathematical physics, in particular to quantum chaos, random matrix theory and number theory.
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Interestingly, the facility was partly inspired by previous research conducted by Russian physicist Andrew Geim in which he floated a frog with a magnet. The experiment earned Geim the Ig Nobel Prize in Physics, a satirical award given to unusual scientific research. It's cool that a quirky experiment involving floating a frog could lead to something approaching an honest-to-God antigravity chamber.
It is said to be the first of its kind and could play a key role in the country's future lunar missions. Landscape is supported by a magnetic field and was inspired by experiments to levitate a frog.