Michael Berry
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- Michael Berry is also the name of a writer.
Sir Michael (Victor) Berry, born 14 March 1941, is a mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol.
He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1982 and knighted in 1996.
He is famous among other things for the Berry phase (also called geometric phase), a phenomenon observed e.g. in quantum mechanics and optics. He specialises in semiclassical physics (asymptotic physics, quantum chaos), applied to wave phenomena in quantum mechanics and other areas such as optics. See also Berry phase.
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Career
Sir Michael has a BSc from the University of Exeter (BSc) and a PhD from the University of St. Andrews. Since then, he has spent his whole career at the University of Bristol: Research Fellow, 1965-7; Lecturer, 1967-74; Reader, 1974-78; Professor of Physics, 1978-88; Royal Society Research Professor since 1988.
Awards
- Maxwell Medal and Prize, Institute of Physics, 1978
- Bakerian Lecturer, Royal Society, 1987
- Member, Royal Scientific Society, Uppsala, 1988
- Dirac Medal and Prize, Institute of Physics, 1990
- Lilienfeld Prize, American Physical Society, 1990
- Royal Medal, Royal Society, 1990
- Naylor Prize and Lectureship in Applied Mathematics, London Mathematical Society, 1992
- Foreign Member: US National Academy of Science, 1995
- Dirac Medal, International Centre for Theoretical Physics, 1996
- Kapitsa Medal, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997
- Wolf Prize for Physics, Wolf Foundation, Israel, 1998
- Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics, 1999
- Foreign Member: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2000
- Ig Nobel Prize for Physics, 2000 (shared with Andrey Geim for 'the Physics of Flying Frogs'
- Onsager Medal, Norwegian Technical University, 2001
- 1st and 3rd prizes, Visions of Science, Novartis/Daily Telegraph, 2002
Publications
- Diffraction of Light by Ultrasound, 1966
- Principles of Cosmology and Gravitation, 1976
- About 350 research papers, book reviews, etc, on physics
External links
- Article on special functions (http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-54/iss-4/p11.html)
- Berry's Homepage (http://www.phy.bris.ac.uk/staff/berry_mv.html)