Anthony Leggett
| Sir Anthony Leggett | |
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Sir Anthony James Leggett
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| Born | Anthony James Leggett 26 March 1938 Camberwell, London, England |
| Residence | United States |
| Citizenship | British and American |
| Fields | Physics |
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| Alma mater | University of Oxford (BA, DPhil) |
| Doctoral advisor | Dirk ter Haar |
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| Spouse | Haruko Kinase (m. 1972) |
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Sir Anthony James Leggett KBE FRS (born 26 March 1938), has been a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1983. Leggett is widely recognized as a world leader in the theory of low-temperature physics, and his pioneering work on superfluidity was recognized by the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics. He has shaped the theoretical understanding of normal and superfluid helium liquids and strongly coupled superfluids. He set directions for research in the quantum physics of macroscopic dissipative systems and use of condensed systems to test the foundations of quantum mechanics.
Leggett was born in Camberwell, South London, and raised Catholic. His father's forebears were village cobblers in a small village in Hampshire; Leggett's grandfather broke with this tradition to become a greengrocer; his father would relate how he used to ride with him to buy vegetables at the Covent Garden market in London. His mother's parents were of Irish descent; her father had moved to Britain and worked as a clerk in the naval dockyard in Chatham. His maternal grandmother, who survived into her eighties, was sent out to domestic service at the age of twelve. She eventually married his grandfather and raised a large family, then in her late sixties emigrated to Australia to join her daughter and son-in-law, and finally returned to the UK for her last years.
His father and mother were each the first in their families to receive a university education; they met and became engaged while students at the Institute of Education at the University of London, but were unable to get married for some years because his father had to care for his own mother and siblings. His father worked as a secondary school teacher of physics, chemistry and mathematics. His mother also taught secondary school mathematics for a time, but had to give this up when he was born. He was eventually followed by two sisters, Clare and Judith, and two brothers, Terence and Paul, all raised in their parents' Roman Catholic faith. Leggett ceased to be a practising Catholic in his early twenties.
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