About Philip W. Anderson
Philip Warren Anderson (December 13, 1923 – March 29, 2020) was an American theoretical physicist who shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nevill Mott and John Van Vleck "for their fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems." Anderson made contributions to the theories of localization, antiferromagnetism, symmetry breaking (including a paper in 1962 discussing symmetry breaking in particle physics, leading to the development of the Standard Model around 10 years later), and high-temperature superconductivity, and to the philosophy of science through his writings on emergent phenomena. He is also responsible for naming the field of physics that is now known as condensed matter physics. == Education == Philip Warren Anderson was born on December 13, 1923, in Indianapolis, Indiana, and grew up in Urbana, Illinois. His father, Harry Warren Anderson, was a professor of plant pathology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign; his maternal grandfather was a mathematician at Wabash College, where Anderson's father studied; and his maternal uncle was a Rhodes Scholar who became a professor of English, also at Wabash College. Anderson graduated from University Laboratory High School in Urbana in 1940. Under the encouragement of a math teacher by the name of Miles Hartley, he enrolled at Harvard University to study under a fully-funded scholarship. He concentrated in "Electronic Physics" and received his B.S. in 1943, after which he was drafted into the war effort and built antennas in the Naval Research Laboratory until the end of the Second World War in 1945. As an undergraduate, his close associates included particle-nuclear physicist H. Pierre Noyes, philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn, and molecular physicist Henry Silsbee. After the war, Anderson returned to Harvard to pursue graduate studies in physics, obtaining an M.A. in 1947 and a Ph.D. in 1949. His doctoral thesis, written under John Van Vleck, was titled The Theory of Pressure Broadening of Spectral Lines in the Microwave and Infrared Regions.
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