J. Michael Kosterlitz

Origins and early life

John Michael Kosterlitz was born in Aberdeen on 22 June 1943 to German Jewish émigrés: his father was the biochemist Hans Walter Kosterlitz, who had fled Nazi persecution of Jews in 1934 and went on to discover the enkephalins, and his mother was Hannah Gresshöner. He was schooled at Robert Gordon's College and the Edinburgh Academy, read at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge and took a doctorate at Oxford in 1969.

Work and career

In the early 1970s, working with David Thouless at Birmingham, he took on a result everyone thought settled: that a two-dimensional sheet of matter cannot order itself, because at any temperature above absolute zero thermal noise destroys the order. The two showed the theorem had missed something. Order can hide in the shape of the thing rather than in its alignment — in whirlpools of spin, which at low temperature are bound in pairs of opposite rotation and at a certain temperature come unbound and wander off.

Nothing is created or destroyed at that point, only untied, and yet the material changes phase; the Kosterlitz–Thouless transition was the first phase transition of a purely topological kind, and it opened the whole field of topological states of matter, which now runs from superfluid films to quantum computing. It brought them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2016 with Duncan Haldane. Kosterlitz has been professor of physics at Brown University since 1982, and was in the 1960s a pioneering alpine climber, with a route in the Orco valley named after him.