Philip Warren Anderson Biography

Philip Warren Anderson is an American physicist and one of the joint winners, with John H. Van Vleck and Sir Nevill F. Mott, of the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physics. He grew up in Urbana, Illinois, where his father was a professor of plant pathology at the University of Illinois. Philip Anderson showed a distinct inclination towards mathematics while he was a student at University Laboratory High School. After graduating from high school, he won the full-support National Scholarship and took admission in the prestigious Harvard University. He had to discontinue his course at Harvard University in order to work for the Naval Research Laboratory at the height of the Second World War; however he returned to education at the end of the war and completed his education, eventually earning a doctorate. His career as a professional was primarily spent at Bell Laboratories, for whom he worked for more than three decades and where he developed Anderson localisation and invented the Anderson Hamiltonian. His most important work was on the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems for which he won the Nobel Prize. Anderson is without doubt one of the most important scientists of his generation.