Friday, October 26, 2007
Professor Anthony Leggett, the 2003 Physics Nobel Laureate spoke to UMES faculty, staff and students and interested members of the community on Friday, October 26.
Professor Leggett addressed the audience in a town-hall style format on his current research on cuprate superconductivity and superfluidity in highly degenerate atomic gases. He is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Chair for the Center for Advanced Study and a professor of physics since 1983 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Recently he committed to a five-year position at the University of Waterloo, where he will spend two months a year at the University’s Institute for Quantum Computing.
Leggett won the 2003 Nobel Prize for Physics for his pioneering work on superfluidity. He is widely known as a world leader in the theory of low-temperature physics and has shaped the theoretical understanding of normal and superfluid helium liquids and other strongly coupled superfluids.
Membership in professional associations he holds are the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a fellow of the United Kingdom’s Royal Society, the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics. Leggett is an honorary fellow of the Institute of Physics in the U.K. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 “for services to physics.” He is a citizen of both the U.S. and the U.K.
Born in Camberwell, South London, Leggett’s parents were first generation college students, like the 51 percent of students at UMES. His father was a secondary school teacher of physics, chemistry and mathematics. His mother taught mathematics. Leggett went on to receive an undergraduate degree from Balliol College, Oxford, a second undergraduate degree from Merton College and an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Oxford University. His thesis work was performed at Magdalen College, Oxford, under the supervision of Dirk terHaar.
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Gail Stephens, assistant director, UMES Office of Public Relations, 410-651-7580, gcstephens@umes.edu.
Photo courtesy of the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
