Michael Berry - Biography

Sir Michael Victor Berry, FRS (born 14 March 1941), is a mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, England.

He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1982 and knighted in 1996. From 2006 he has been Editor of the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society.

He is famous among other things for the Berry 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.

Career

Berry has a BSc in physics from the University of Exeter 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

Michael Berry has achieved the following prizes and awards:

• Maxwell Medal and Prize, Institute of Physics, 1978
• Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London, 1982
• Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, 1983
• Elected Fellow of the Royal Institution, 1983
• Elected Member of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden, 1986
• Bakerian Lecturer, Royal Society, 1987
• Elected member of the European Academy, 1989
• 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 Andre Geim for "The Physics of Flying Frogs")
• Onsager Medal, Norwegian Technical University, 2001
• 1st and 3rd prizes, Visions of Science, Novartis/Daily Telegraph, 2002
• Elected to Royal Society of Edinburgh 2005
• Pólya Prize, London Mathematical Society 2005
• Doctor of Science, honoris causa, University of Glasgow 2007

Publications

• Diffraction of Light by Ultrasound, 1966
• Principles of Cosmology and Gravitation, 1976
• About 395 research papers, book reviews, etc., on physics

See also

• List of British Jewish scientists
• Berry phase

External links

• Michael Berry homepage
• Article on special functions