Philip W. Anderson
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Philip Warren Anderson
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1977
Born: 13 December 1923, Indianapolis, IN, USA
Died: 29 March 2020, Princeton, NJ, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA
Prize motivation: “for their fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems”
Prize share: 1/3
Work
Solid materials often have a regular crystalline structure and composition, but sometimes they constitute disordered systems. These could be alloys with a regular structure but a more random composition. Other solid materials, such as glass, lack a regular structure. In 1958 Philip Anderson showed the conditions under which an electron can move about freely within a disordered system and when it is more or less bound to a specific place. This and other works have contributed to a deeper understanding of electrical phenomena in disordered systems.
Nobel Prizes and laureates
Six prizes were awarded for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The 12 laureates' work and discoveries range from proteins' structures and machine learning to fighting for a world free of nuclear weapons.
See them all presented here.
