Michael Victor Berry

Sir Michael Victor Berry, FRS, FRSE, FRSA (born 14 March 1941), is a mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, England.

He is known for the Berry phase, a phenomenon observed e.g. in quantum mechanics and optics, as well as Berry connection and curvature.He specialises in semiclassical physics (asymptotic physics, quantum chaos), applied to wave phenomena in quantum mechanics and other areas such as optics.

The son of a London taxi driver and a dressmaker, Berry has a BSc in physics from the University of Exeter and a PhD from the University of St. Andrews.

He has spent his whole career at the University of Bristol: research fellow, 1965–67; lecturer, 1967–74; reader, 1974–78; Professor of Physics, 1978–88; Royal Society Research Professor 1988-2006. Since 2006 he is Melville Wills Professor of Physics (Emeritus) at Bristol University.

Publications

• Diffraction of Light by Ultrasound, 1966
• Principles of Cosmology and Gravitation, 1976; 2nd edition. 1989; pbk
• About 395 research papers, book reviews, etc., on physics

Awards and honours

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1982 and knighted in 1996.From 2006 to 2012 he was Editor of the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

Berry has been given the following prizes and awards:

• Maxwell Medal and Prize, Institute of Physics, 1978
• Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London, 1982
• Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, 1983
• Elected Fellow of the Royal Institution, 1983
• Elected Member of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden, 1986
• Bakerian Lecturer, Royal Society, 1987
• Elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1989
• Dirac Medal and Prize, Institute of Physics, 1990
• Lilienfeld Prize, American Physical Society, 1990
• Royal Medal, Royal Society, 1990
• Naylor Prize and Lectureship in Applied Mathematics, London Mathematical Society, 1992
• Foreign Member: US National Academy of Science, 1995
• Dirac Medal, International Centre for Theoretical Physics, 1996
• Kapitsa Medal, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997
• Wolf Prize for Physics, Wolf Foundation, Israel, 1998
• Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics, 1999
• Forder Lectureship, London Mathematical Society, 1999
• Foreign Member: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2000
• Ig Nobel Prize for Physics, 2000 (shared with Andre Geim for "The Physics of Flying Frogs")
• Onsager Medal, Norwegian Technical University, 2001
• Gibbs Lecturer, American Mathematical Society, 2002
• 1st and 3rd prizes, Visions of Science, Novartis/Daily Telegraph, 2002
• Elected to Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2005
• Pólya Prize, London Mathematical Society, 2005
• Doctor of Science, honoris causa, University of Glasgow, 2007
• Doctor of Science, honoris causa, Russian-Armenian (Slavonic) University in Yerevan, 2012
• Lorentz Medal, 2015
• Lise Meitner Distinguished Lecture, 2019