David J. Thouless

British physicist (1934–2019)

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. 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, in Seattle in 1980. For atomic nuclei, he cleared up the concept of 'rearrangement energy' and derived an expression for the moment of inertia of deformed nuclei. include:

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). He died on 6 April 2019 in Cambridge, aged 84.