Professor Philip Anderson (1923-2020)

It is with much regret that the College notes the death of Honorary Fellow Professor Philip Anderson on 29 March 2020.

Professor Anderson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977, jointly with Sir Neville Mott and John van Fleck, for their fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems. Anderson’s prize winning insight was that electrons may be unable to pass through a disordered metal, not because of absorption, but, with all the multiple diffracting paths cancelling, because the incident energy of the electron wave is completely reflected.

He was a Fellow of Jesus from 1969 to 1975 while he held a Visiting Professorship at the Cavendish Laboratory, and became an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College in 1978.

After leaving Cambridge, Professor Anderson returned to the United States to work at Princeton University. He won many other accolades in his long career, and received the National Medal of Science from the President of the United States in 1982.